奉献精神
Dedication
对我来说，奉献是困难的，因为我是。. . 幸运的。
For me, dedications are difficult because I’m . . . lucky.
我在正确的时间出生在正确的国家，安全地成长。
I was born in the right country at the right time to grow up in safety.
同时足够大和足够年轻，可以认识到从躲避到 5G 的转变中的脱节和机遇。
Simultaneously old enough and young enough to recognize the disconnects and opportunities in the shift from duck-and-cover to 5G.
我幸运地遇到了数不清的导师，只有他们选择扮演这个角色才有可能。
I’ve been blessed with more mentors than I can count, something only possible because they chose to play the role.
我在我的领域只是因为那些前人，我能够阅读未来只是因为那些将要来的人问我的问题。
I’m in my field only because of those who have come before, and I’m able to read the future only because of the questions I’m asked by those who will come after.
没有这个村庄，我的工作——我的生活——就不可能完成。
Without the village, my work—my life—would not be possible.
所以谢谢。
So thank you.
谢谢你们。
Thank you all.
内容
Contents
Enter the Accidental Superpower
And Now for Something Completely Different
A Quick Note from the Author . . . and Moscow
Breaking Free: Industrializing Transport
Currencies: Navigating the Road Less Traveled
The End of More, Redux: Demographics and Capital
Finagling Future Financing Failures
The Map of Oil: Contemporary Edition
Section V: Industrial Materials
The Geopolitics of Vulnerability
Avoiding—or Accepting—the Worst
Expanding the Diet, Shrinking the Diet
Agriculture and Climate Change
介绍
Introduction
过去一个世纪左右的时间有点像进步的闪电战。从马车到客运火车再到家用汽车再到日常航空旅行。从算盘到加法机到桌面计算器再到智能手机。从铁到不锈钢再到含硅铝再到触敏玻璃。从等待小麦到伸手去拿柑橘，再到递给巧克力再到按需鳄梨酱。
The past century or so has been a bit of a blitzkrieg of progress. From horse-and-buggy to passenger trains to the family car to everyday air travel. From the abacus to adding machines to desktop calculators to smartphones. From iron to stainless steel to silicon-laced aluminum to touch-sensitive glass. From waiting for wheat to reaching for citrus to being handed chocolate to on-demand guacamole.
我们的世界变得更便宜了。当然更好。而且绝对更快。近几十年来，变革和成就的步伐进一步加快。在短短 15 年内，我们见证了 30 多个更加复杂的 iPhone 版本的发布。我们正试图以采用传统内燃机发动机十倍的速度将批发转向电动汽车。我正在使用的笔记本电脑的内存比1960 年代后期全球所有计算机的总和还要多。不久前，我能够以 2.5% 的利率为我的房屋再融资。（这真是太棒了。）
Our world has gotten cheaper. And certainly better. And most definitely faster. And in recent decades the paces of change and achievement have accelerated further. We’ve witnessed the release of more than thirty ever-more-sophisticated versions of the iPhone in just fifteen years. We’re attempting to shift wholesale to electronic vehicles at ten times the pace we adopted traditional combustion engines. The laptop I’m tapping this down on has more memory than the combined total of all computers globally in the late 1960s. Not long ago I was able to refinance my home at a rate of 2.5 percent. (It was stupidly awesome.)
这不仅仅是关于东西、速度和金钱。人类状况也同样有所改善。在过去的七十年中，就人口的百分比而言，死于战争、占领、饥荒和疾病爆发的人数比有记载的历史黎明以来更少。从历史上看，我们生活在富贵与安宁的尴尬之中。所有这些以及更多的演变都紧密交织在一起。形影不离。但有一个简单的事实常常被忽视。
It isn’t simply about stuff and speed and money. The human condition has similarly improved. During the past seven decades, as a percent of the population, fewer people have died in fewer wars and fewer occupations and fewer famines and fewer disease outbreaks than since the dawn of recorded history. Historically speaking, we live in an embarrassment of riches and peace. All of these evolutions and more are tightly interwoven. Inseparable. But there is a simple fact that is often overlooked.
它们是人造的。我们一直生活在一个完美的时刻。
They are artificial. We have been living in a perfect moment.
它正在过去。
And it is passing.
过去几十年的世界是我们一生中最好的世界。我们正在迅速过渡到一个更昂贵、更差、更慢的世界，而不是更便宜、更好、更快的世界。因为世界——我们的世界——正在分崩离析。
The world of the past few decades has been the best it will ever be in our lifetime. Instead of cheap and better and faster, we’re rapidly transitioning into a world that’s pricier and worse and slower. Because the world—our world—is breaking apart.
我已经超前了。
I’m getting ahead of myself.
在许多方面，这本书是我做过的最典型的“我”项目。我的工作恰好让我处于地缘政治和人口统计学的交叉点。地缘政治学是对地方的研究，探索我们周围的一切如何是我们所处位置的结果。人口统计学是对人口结构的研究。青少年的行为不同于三十多岁、五十多岁和七十多岁。我将这两个不同的主题编织在一起来预测未来。我的前三本书无非是关于国家的衰落和崛起。关于探索未来世界的“大局”。
In many ways this book is the most quintessentially “me” project I’ve done. My work lands me squarely at the intersection of geopolitics and demography. Geopolitics is the study of place, exploring how everything about us is an outcome of where we are. Demography is the study of population structures. Teens act different from thirty-somethings versus fifty-somethings versus seventy-somethings. I weave together these two disparate themes to forecast the future. My first three books were about nothing less than the fall and rise of nations. About exploring the “big picture” of the world to come.
但你只能在兰利演讲那么多次。为了支付账单，我做了其他事情。
But you can only speak at Langley so many times. To pay the bills I do something else.
我真正的工作是一种混合的公共演讲者/顾问（花哨的营销术语是地缘政治战略家）。
My real job is a sort of hybrid public speaker/consultant (the fancy marketing term is geopolitical strategist).
当团体邀请我加入时，他们很少想思考安哥拉或乌兹别克斯坦的未来。他们的需求和问题更贴近家庭和他们的钱包，包裹在一系列关于贸易和市场以及准入的经济问题中。我所做的是将地缘政治和人口统计学应用于他们的问题。他们的梦想。他们的恐惧。我将我的“大局”中的适当部分剥离出来，并将它们应用于东南部的电力需求问题，或威斯康星州的精密制造，或南非的金融流动性，或墨西哥边境地区的安全与贸易关系问题，或中西部的交通选择，或美国政府换届期间的能源政策，或韩国的重工业，或华盛顿州的树果。
When groups bring me in, it’s rare that they want to ruminate over the future of Angola or Uzbekistan. Their needs and questions are closer to home and their pocketbooks, wrapped up in a series of economic questions about trade and markets and access. What I do is apply geopolitics and demography to their problems. Their dreams. Their fears. I peel out the appropriate parts of my “big picture” and apply them to questions of electricity demand in the Southeast, or precision manufacturing in Wisconsin, or financial liquidity in South Africa, or the nexus of security and trade in the Mexico border region, or transport options in the Midwest, or energy policy during the turn of American administrations, or heavy industry in Korea, or tree fruits in Washington State.
这本书不仅如此，而且更多。这么多。我再次使用我可靠的地缘政治和人口统计学工具来预测全球经济结构的未来，或者更准确地说，预测它们即将缺乏的经济结构。展示地平线后世界的形状。
This book is all that and more. So much more. I’m once again using my trusty tools of geopolitics and demography to forecast the future of global economic structures, or, to be more accurate, their soon-to-be lack thereof. To showcase the shape of the world just past the horizon.
我们所有人面临的问题的症结在于，从地缘政治和人口统计角度来看，在过去 75 年的大部分时间里，我们一直生活在那个完美的时刻。
The crux of the problem we all face is that, geopolitically and demographically speaking, for most of the last seventy-five years we have been living in that perfect moment.
二战结束时，美国人建立了历史上最伟大的军事联盟来逮捕、遏制和击退苏联。那我们知道。这并不奇怪。然而，经常被遗忘的是，这个联盟只是计划的一半。为了巩固他们的新联盟，美国人还培育了一种全球安全环境，这样任何伙伴都可以随时随地，以任何经济方式与任何人接触，参与任何供应链并获得任何物质投入——所有这些都不需要军事护送 美国人枪支与黄油交易中的黄油面创造了我们今天公认的自由贸易。全球化。
At the end of World War II, the Americans created history’s greatest military alliance to arrest, contain, and beat back the Soviet Union. That we know. That’s no surprise. What is often forgotten, however, is that this alliance was only half the plan. In order to cement their new coalition, the Americans also fostered an environment of global security so that any partner could go anywhere, anytime, interface with anyone, in any economic manner, participate in any supply chain and access any material input—all without needing a military escort. This butter side of the Americans’ guns-and-butter deal created what we today recognize as free trade. Globalization.
全球化第一次将发展和工业化带到了地球的广大地区，产生了我们都非常熟悉的大众消费社会、贸易暴风雪和技术进步的主宰。这重塑了全球人口结构。大规模发展和工业化延长了寿命，同时鼓励城市化。几十年来，这意味着越来越多的工人和消费者，那些认真对待经济的人。许多结果之一是人类有史以来最快的经济增长。几十年了。
Globalization brought development and industrialization to a wide swath of the planet for the first time, generating the mass consumption societies and the blizzard of trade and the juggernaut of technological progress we all find so familiar. And that reshaped global demographics. Mass development and industrialization extended life spans, while simultaneously encouraging urbanization. For decades that meant more and more workers and consumers, the people who give economies some serious go. One outcome among many was the fastest economic growth humanity has ever seen. Decades of it.
美国人的战后秩序引发了形势的变化。通过改变游戏规则，经济在全球范围内发生了转变。以国家为基础。本地基础。每个地方的基础。这种条件的变化产生了我们所知道的世界。这个世界拥有先进的交通和金融、永远存在的食物和能源、永无止境的改进和令人难以置信的速度。
The Americans’ postwar Order triggered a change in condition. By shifting the rules of the game, economics transformed on a global basis. A national basis. A local basis. Every local basis. That change of condition generated the world that we know. The world of advanced transport and finance, of ever-present food and energy, of never-ending improvements and mind-bending speed.
但一切都必须过去。我们现在面临一个新的情况变化。
But all things must pass. We now face a new change in condition.
冷战结束三十年后，美国人已经回家了。没有其他人拥有支持全球安全以及全球贸易的军事能力。美国领导的秩序正在让位给混乱。一旦我们达到了增长的完美时刻，全球老龄化并没有停止。老化继续。它还在继续。全球工人和消费者群体正在老龄化，进入大规模退休。在我们急于城市化的过程中，没有一代人诞生。
Thirty years on from the Cold War’s end, the Americans have gone home. No one else has the military capacity to support global security, and from that, global trade. The American-led Order is giving way to Disorder. Global aging didn’t stop once we reached that perfect moment of growth. Aging continued. It’s still continuing. The global worker and consumer base is aging into mass retirement. In our rush to urbanize, no replacement generation was ever born.
自 1945 年以来，世界一直是最好的。这将是最好的。这是一种诗意的说法，这个时代，这个世界——我们的世界——注定要灭亡。2020 年代将见证消费和生产的崩溃投资和贸易几乎无处不在。全球化将分崩离析。一些区域性的。一些国家的。有的更小。这将是昂贵的。它会让生活变慢。最重要的是，更糟。目前还没有任何经济体系能够在我们面临的那种未来中发挥作用。
Since 1945 the world has been the best it has ever been. The best it will ever be. Which is a poetic way of saying this era, this world—our world—is doomed. The 2020s will see a collapse of consumption and production and investment and trade almost everywhere. Globalization will shatter into pieces. Some regional. Some national. Some smaller. It will be costly. It will make life slower. And above all, worse. No economic system yet imagined can function in the sort of future we face.
至少可以说，这种权力下放将是不和谐的。我们花了数十年的和平时间才弄清楚我们这个世界。认为我们会轻松或快速地适应这种巨大的解体是表现出比我能够产生的更多的乐观情绪。
This devolution will be jarring, to say the least. It’s taken us decades of peace to suss out this world of ours. To think that we will adapt easily or quickly to such titanic unravelings is to showcase more optimism than I’m capable of generating.
但这不等于说我没有几个路标。
But that’s not the same as saying I don’t have a few guideposts.
首先是我称之为“成功地理”的东西。地点很重要。非常。埃及城市现在之所以如此，是因为它们在前工业时代拥有水和沙漠缓冲区的完美结合。有点相似的是，西班牙人和葡萄牙人的崛起并不仅仅因为他们早期掌握了深水技术，而是因为他们位于半岛上的位置在某种程度上使他们摆脱了欧洲大陆的普遍混战。
First comes something I call the “Geography of Success.” Place matters. Hugely. The Egyptian cities are where they are because they had the perfect mix of water and desert buffer for the preindustrial age. Somewhat similarly, the Spanish and Portuguese rose to dominance not simply because of their early mastery of deepwater technologies, but because their location on a peninsula somewhat freed them from the general melee of the European continent.
将工业技术融入其中，故事就会发生变化。大规模应用煤炭、混凝土、铁路和钢筋需要大量资金，唯一可以自筹资金的地方是那些拥有大量可产生资本的通航水道的地方。德国比欧洲任何国家都多，这使得德国的崛起不可避免。但美国人比世界上任何人——比世界上其他任何人——都更能使德国人的垮台不可避免。
Toss industrial technologies into the mix and the story shifts. Applying coal and concrete and railways and rebar en masse takes a lot of money, and the only places that could self-fund were those with a plethora of capital-generating navigable waterways. Germany has more than anyone in Europe, making the German rise inevitable. But the Americans have more than anyone in the world—than everyone else in the world—making the German fall just as inevitable.
其次，您可能已经自己弄清楚了这一点，成功的地理区域并非一成不变。随着技术的发展，赢家和输家的名单也随之改变。利用水和风的进步侵蚀了埃及在历史上的特殊地位，为新的大国名单提供了空间。工业革命使西班牙沦为一潭死水，同时预示着英国帝国的开始。即将到来的全球混乱和人口崩溃不仅会谴责许多国家过去；它将预示着其他人的崛起。
Second, and you may have figured this out for yourself already, Geographies of Success are not immutable. As technologies evolve, the lists of winners and losers shift with them. Advances in harnessing water and wind eroded what made Egypt special into history, providing room for a new slate of major powers. The Industrial Revolution reduced Spain to a backwater, while heralding the beginning of the English Imperium. The coming global Disorder and demographic collapse will do more than condemn a multitude of countries to the past; it will herald the rise of others.
第三，转移可能影响的参数。. . 几乎所有的东西。我们全球化的世界是全球性的。全球化的世界只有一种经济地理：整体地理。不管贸易或产品，几乎每一个过程都至少跨越一个国际边界。一些比较复杂的交叉数千。在我们正在（d）进化的世界中，那是不明智的。一个去全球化的世界不仅仅拥有不同的经济地理，它还拥有成千上万个不同且独立的地理区域。从经济上讲，整体因包含其所有部分而更强大。这是我们获得财富、改进步伐和速度的地方。现在这些部分会因为它们的分离而变弱。
Third, shifting the parameters of the possible impacts . . . pretty much everything. Our globalized world is, well, global. A globalized world has one economic geography: the geography of the whole. Regardless of trade or product, nearly every process crosses at least one international border. Some of the more complex cross thousands. In the world we are (d)evolving into, that is relentlessly unwise. A deglobalized world doesn’t simply have a different economic geography, it has thousands of different and separate geographies. Economically speaking, the whole was stronger for the inclusion of all its parts. It is where we have gotten our wealth and pace of improvement and speed. Now the parts will be weaker for their separation.
第四，尽管全球动荡和退化，而且在许多情况下，美国将在很大程度上逃脱即将到来的大屠杀。那可能触发了你的 BS 检测器。我怎么能断言美国会在如此喧嚣的事情上跳华尔兹呢？不断加剧的经济不平等、不断破裂的社会结构以及越来越痛苦和自我毁灭的政治局面又如何呢？
Fourth, not only despite the global churn and degradation, but also in many cases because of it, the United States will largely escape the carnage to come. That probably triggered your BS detector. How can I assert that the United States will waltz through something this tumultuous? What with its ever-rising economic inequality, ever-fraying social fabric, and ever-more bitter and self-destructive political scene?
我理解反身的怀疑。我在躲避掩护的时代长大。我发现令人恼火的是，大学中没有不同观点的“安全空间”、跨性别卫生间政策和疫苗福利等问题甚至已经进入众所周知的城镇广场，更不用说核扩散或美国地位等几乎被排挤的问题了在世界上。有时感觉好像美国的政策是从伯尼桑德斯和马乔里泰勒格林之间的摩托车拉力赛四年之久的随机想法中粘贴在一起的。
I understand the reflexive disbelief. I grew up during the age of duck-and-cover. I find it galling that issues such as “safe spaces” in colleges devoid of divergent viewpoints, transgender bathroom policy, and vaccine benefits have even crossed into the proverbial town square, much less all but crowded-out issues such as nuclear proliferation or America’s place in the world. Sometimes it feels as though American policy is pasted together from the random thoughts of the four-year-old product of a biker rally tryst between Bernie Sanders and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
我的答案？这很简单：这与他们无关。从来都不是关于他们的。我所说的“他们”不仅仅指当代美国激进的左翼和右翼的无拘无束的怪人，我指的是美国的政治参与者。2020 年代并不是美国第一次对其政治体系进行彻底重组。对于那些有历史倾向的人来说，这是第七轮。美国人之所以能幸存下来并繁荣昌盛，是因为他们的地理位置与世界大部分地区隔绝，而他们的人口结构明显比世界大部分地区年轻。出于类似的原因，它们现在和未来都将生存和繁荣。美国的优势使她的辩论变得微不足道，而这些辩论几乎不会影响她的优势。
My answer? That’s easy: it isn’t about them. It has never been about them. And by “them” I don’t simply mean the unfettered wackadoos of contemporary America’s radicalized Left and Right, I mean America’s political players in general. The 2020s are not the first time the United States has gone through a complete restructuring of its political system. This is round seven for those of you with minds of historical bents. Americans survived and thrived before because their geography is insulated from, while their demographic profile is starkly younger than, the bulk of the world. They will survive and thrive now and into the future for similar reasons. America’s strengths allow her debates to be petty, while those debates barely affect her strengths.
也许我们即将出现的最奇怪的事情是，虽然美国人陶醉于他们内部的琐碎争吵，他们几乎不会注意到世界其他地方正在结束！！！灯光会闪烁并变暗。饥荒坚韧的爪子会深入挖掘并紧紧抓住。获得定义现代世界的投入——金融、物质和劳动力——的数量将不再足以使现代性成为可能。每个地方的故事都会有所不同，但总的主题是明确无误的：过去的七十五年将作为一个黄金时代被人们铭记，而这个时代持续的时间还不够长。
Perhaps the oddest thing of our soon-to-be present is that while the Americans revel in their petty, internal squabbles, they will barely notice that elsewhere the world is ending!!! Lights will flicker and go dark. Famine’s leathery claws will dig deep and hold tight. Access to the inputs—financial and material and labor—that define the modern world will cease existing in sufficient quantity to make modernity possible. The story will be different everywhere, but the overarching theme will be unmistakable: the last seventy-five years long will be remembered as a golden age, and one that didn’t last nearly long enough at that.
本书的中心点不仅仅是关于使我们的世界成为我们的世界的每个经济部门的每个方面的变化的深度和广度。这不仅仅是关于历史再次蹒跚前行。这不仅仅是关于我们的世界如何结束。真正的重点是绘制出这种情况变化的另一面的一切。possible 的新参数是什么？在去全球化的世界中，新的成功地域是什么？
The center point of this book is not simply about the depth and breadth of changes in store for every aspect of every economic sector that makes our world our world. It is not simply about history once again lurching forward. It is not simply about how our world ends. The real focus is to map out what everything looks like on the other side of this change in condition. What are the new parameters of the possible? In a world deglobalized, what are the new Geographies of Success?
接下来会发生什么？
What comes next?
毕竟，世界末日真的只是一个开始。所以，最好从这里开始。
After all, the end of the world really is just the beginning. So, it’s best if we start there.
一开始。
At the beginning.
开始是如何开始的
How the Beginning Began
起初我们是流浪者。
In the beginning we were wanderers.
我们四处游荡，不是因为我们在寻找自我；我们徘徊是因为我们是HONGRY。我们随着季节流浪到根茎、坚果和浆果更丰富的地方。我们在海拔带上下徘徊，寻找不同的植物。我们跟踪动物迁徙，因为那是牛排的所在地。被认为是避难所的是您在需要时可以找到的东西。通常，我们不会在同一个地方停留超过几周，因为我们很快就会在院子里觅食和打猎，一无所获。我们的胃会迫使我们重新开始流浪。
We didn’t wander because we were trying to find ourselves; we wandered because we were HONGRY. We wandered with the seasons to places with more abundant roots, nuts, and berries. We wandered up and down elevation bands to forage for different plants. We followed the animal migrations because that’s where the steaks were. What passed for shelter was what you could find when you needed it. Typically, we would not stay in the same place for more than a few weeks because we’d forage and hunt the yard to nothing in no time. Our stomachs would force us to start wandering anew.
这一切的局限性非常有限。独立人类唯一的动力来源是肌肉，首先是我们自己的肌肉，后来是我们可以驯服的少数动物的肌肉。饥饿、疾病和伤害很常见，不幸的是，它们极有可能被证明是致命的。你吃的任何自然提供的根或兔子都是别人不会吃的。所以，当然，我们生活在“与自然和谐相处”的环境中。. . 换句话说，每当我们看到邻居时，我们往往会把他们打得落花流水。
The limitations of it all were pretty, well, limiting. The only power source an unaided human has are muscles, first our own and later that of the handful of animals that we could tame. Starvation, disease, and injury were common and had the unfortunately high likelihood of proving lethal. And any provided-by-nature root or rabbit that you ate was one that someone else would not be eating. So, sure, we lived in “harmony with nature” . . . which is another way of saying we tended to beat the crap out of our neighbors whenever we saw them.
赔率是，谁赢得了战斗，谁吃了失败者。
Odds are, whoever won the fight ate the loser.
非常令人兴奋，是吧？
Pretty exciting, eh?
然后，奇迹般的一天，我们开始了一些新的奇妙的事情，让生活变得不那么暴力和不稳定，我们的世界从根本上改变了：
Then, one miraculous day, we started something new and wondrous that made life less violent and less precarious and our world fundamentally changed:
我们开始在便便中进行园艺。
We started gardening in our poo.
久坐不动的农业革命
THE SEDENTARY FARMING REVOLUTION
人类的便便是一种奇怪的东西。由于人类是杂食动物，因此他们的便便拥有自然界中营养物质最密集的浓度。因为人类知道他们的粪便在哪里，呃，沉积。. . 让我们称之为“库存”和“确保新鲜供应”是一个简单的过程。*
Human poo is an odd thing. Since humans are omnivores, their poo boasts among the densest concentrations of nutrients in the natural world. Since humans know where their poo gets, er, deposited . . . let’s call it “inventorying” and “securing fresh supplies” was a simple process.*
事实证明，人类粪便是最好的肥料和生长介质之一，不仅在前文明世界，而且在 19 世纪中叶大规模引入化肥之前——在世界某些地区，甚至在今天也是如此。管理便便给我们带来了一些一流的区别。毕竟，没有人真的想收集、盘点、分发和……。. . 应用的东西。这就是为什么印度的贱民曾经/现在如此的部分原因。. . 贱民——他们做了收集和分发“粪便”的杂乱工作。*
Human poo proved to be one of the best fertilizer and growth mediums not just in the pre-civilized world, but right up until the mass introduction of chemical fertilizers in the mid-nineteenth century—and in some parts of the world, even today. Managing poo introduced us to some of our first class-based distinctions. After all, no one really wanted to gather and inventory and distribute and . . . apply the stuff. It is part of why India’s Untouchables were/are so . . . untouchable—they did the messy work of collecting and distributing “night soil.”*
大便突破——通常被称为人类第一个真正的技术套件，久坐农业——也向人类介绍了地缘政治的第一条规则：位置很重要，以及哪些位置更重要，随着当今技术的变化。
The Great Poo Breakthrough—more commonly referred to as humanity’s first true technological suite, sedentary agriculture—also introduced humans to the first rule of geopolitics: location matters, and which locations matter more changes with the technology of the day.
第一个成功地理学，即狩猎/采集时代的地理学，都是关于范围和多样性的。良好的营养意味着能够利用多种类型的植物和动物。没有人喜欢搬家，所以我们不会搬家，直到某个区域被清理干净。由于我们倾向于很快清理一个区域，并且因为饥饿会无情地将我们推向更绿色的牧场，所以我们需要能够轻松地重新安置。因此，我们倾向于集中在气候变化多端且足迹相当密集的地区。事实证明山脚下特别受欢迎因为我们可以在相对较短的水平距离内到达几个不同的气候带。另一个受欢迎的选择是热带融入稀树草原的地方，这样我们就可以在雨季开发游戏丰富的稀树草原，在干旱季节开发植物丰富的雨林。
The first Geography of Success, that of the hunter/gatherer era, was all about range and variety. Good nutrition meant being able to tap multiple types of plants and animals. No one likes moving house, so we wouldn’t relocate until an area had been picked clean. Since we tended to clear out an area pretty quickly, and because hunger would mercilessly nudge us to greener pastures, we needed to be able to easily relocate. We tended to concentrate, therefore, in areas with a great deal of climatic variety in a fairly dense footprint. Mountain foothills proved particularly popular because we could access several different climatic zones in a relatively short amount of horizontal distance. Another popular choice was where the tropics bled into the savanna so we could tap game-rich savannas in the wet season, and the plant-rich rain forests in the dry.
埃塞俄比亚尤其受到狩猎者/采集者的青睐，因为它将稀树草原、雨林和垂直条纹融为一体。但这对于（便便）农业来说完全是废话。
Ethiopia was particularly favored by hunter/gatherers as it blended savanna, rain forest, and vertical striations into a single neat package. But that was utter crap for (poo) farming.
从一个地方获取所需的所有食物需要一大块平坦的地面——而不是那种可以维持猎人/采集者生存的传播或多样性。狩猎/采集者饮食流动的季节性在很大程度上与作物的持续关注需求不相容，而收割作物的季节性在很大程度上与人类全年进食的需求不相容。仅仅因为你留在原地耕种并不意味着你的邻居也是。如果没有适当的抑制措施，它们往往会直接在您的花园里觅食，您将失去数月的工作并重新陷入饥饿状态。许多部落开始耕种只是因为它不可行而放弃了。
Getting all the food you needed from one place required a single large-ish chunk of flattish ground—not the sort of spread or variety that could sustain hunter/gatherers. The seasonality of movement of the hunter/gatherer diet was largely incompatible with the constant attention requirements of crops, while the seasonal nature of harvesting crops was largely incompatible with the needs of humans’ desires to eat year-round. And just because you were staying put and farming didn’t mean your neighbors were. Without proper disincentives, they’d tend to forage right through your garden and you’d be out months of work and back into starvation mode. Many tribes started farming only to abandon it as unworkable.
将这些特定的圆圈平方不仅需要我们学习一种不同的养活自己的方式，还迫使我们找到一种不同的地理环境来获取食物。
Squaring these particular circles not only required that we learn a different way of feeding ourselves, it also forced us to find a different sort of geography from which we could source the food.
我们需要一种完全没有季节性的气候，这样农作物就可以全年种植和收获，从而消除饥饿季节。我们需要稳定的水流，这样才能依靠这些作物年复一年地养活我们。我们需要大自然提供良好、坚固的天然围栏的地方，这样邻居们就不会随便走进来拿我们的劳动成果。我们需要不同的成功地理。
We needed a climate with a sufficient lack of seasonality so crops could be grown and harvested year-round, thus eliminating the starving season. We needed consistent water flows so that those crops could be relied upon to sustain us year-in, year-out. We needed places where nature provided good, sturdy natural fences so that the neighbors couldn’t just walk in and help themselves to our labor-fruits. We needed a different Geography of Success.
水革命
THE WATER REVOLUTION
地球上唯一符合这三个标准的地方是流经低纬度和低海拔沙漠的河流。
The only places on Earth that sport all three criteria are rivers that flow through low-latitude and low-altitude deserts.
这其中的某些部分是显而易见的。
Some parts of this are obvious.
»任何农民或园丁都知道，如果不下雨，你就完蛋了。然而，如果你在河岸开店，你永远不会用完灌溉用水，除非某个大胡子的家伙开始写圣经。
»As any farmer or gardener knows, if it doesn’t rain, you’re screwed. Yet if you set up shop on the banks of a river, you’ll never run out of water for irrigation unless some bearded dude starts writing a Bible.
»低纬度地区全年阳光充足；缺乏季节性变化使复种成为可能。在更多的时间收获更多的庄稼意味着更少的饥饿感，而饥饿感很糟糕。
»Low-latitude regions get long, sun-filled days all year; the lack of seasonal variation enables multi-cropping. More crops at more times means less hunger, and hunger sucks.
»高海拔的河流快速而笔直地流过，并在其流过时切割景观中的峡谷。相比之下，低海拔河流更有可能蜿蜒穿过平坦地带，使它们的水与更多潜在的农田接触。作为一个额外的好处，当一条辫状河因春季洪水泛滥成河时，它会留下一层厚厚的营养丰富的沉积物。淤泥是一种很好的便便增强剂。
»High-elevation rivers flow fast and straight and cut canyons in the landscape as they go. In contrast, low-altitude rivers are more likely to meander through flat zones, bringing their water into contact with more potential farmland. As an added bonus, when a braided river overflows its banks with the spring floods, it leaves behind a nice thick layer of nutrient-rich sediment. Silt is a great poo enhancer.
»在沙漠地区让那些讨厌的觅食邻居远离。任何理智的猎人/采集者都不会走到沙漠的边缘，凝视着无尽的热浪，然后梦幻般地认为，“我敢打赌那里有一些很棒的兔子和芜菁甘蓝。” 尤其是在宽松凉鞋是最耐用鞋类的时代。
»Being in a desert region keeps those pesky foraging neighbors at bay. No sane hunter/gatherer is going to get to the edge of a desert, gaze into the endless mass of heat ripples, and dreamily opine, “I bet there are some awesome rabbits and rutabagas that-a-way.” Especially in an era when loose sandals were the most durable footwear available.
里弗斯还有一些不太明显但同样重要的优势。
Rivers also hold a couple of less obvious advantages that are just as critical.
其中第一个是运输。移动东西并不是那么容易。假设您可以使用柏油路或混凝土路——这种直到 20 世纪初才出现的道路——与水路相比，在陆地上移动物体所需的能量大约是水路移动的十二倍。在公元前一千年的早期，当一流的道路是碎石路时，能源断开的可能性更大，约为 100 比 1。*
The first of them is transport. Moving stuff around isn’t all that easy. Assuming you have access to an asphalt or concrete road—the sort of road that didn’t even exist until the early twentieth century—it takes about twelve times as much energy to move things on land as compared to water. In the early years of the first millennia BCE, when a top-notch road was gravel, that energy disconnect was more likely in the neighborhood of 100 to 1.*
有一条缓慢流过我们第一个家园中心的沙漠河流使人类能够将一切从过剩的地方转移到需要的地方。劳动力分配使早期人类能够开发更多的田地，从而增加种植面积和粮食供应，并在不需要距离我们居住地仅几步之遥的地方这样做。这些优势通常是巨大成功（即，每个人都没有挨饿）和同样惊人的失败（每个人都挨饿）之间的区别。还有一个甚至不是微不足道的安全问题：通过水路分配士兵使我们能够抵挡那些愚蠢到穿越我们沙漠草坪的邻居。
Having a slow-moving desert river running through the hearts of our first homelands enabled humans to relocate everything from where it was in surplus to where it was in demand. Labor distribution enabled early humans to exploit more fields and so increase plantings and food supplies, and to do so in places that didn’t need to be within a short walk of where we lived. Such advantages were often the difference between spectacular success (that is, everybody doesn’t starve) and equally spectacular failure (everybody does starve). There was also the not-even-remotely-insignificant issue of security: soldier distribution via the waterways enabled us to fend off those neighbors dumb enough to cross our desert lawns.
这个交通问题本身就把早期的农学家与其他人区分开来。更多的土地生产更安全意味着更多的粮食生产，这意味着更多和更稳定的人口，这意味着更多的土地生产更安全，等等。我们不再是游荡的部落，我们是稳定的社区。
This transport issue, all by itself, separated the early agriculturalists from everyone else. More lands under more secure production meant more food produced, which meant larger and more stable populations, which meant more lands under more secure production, and so on. We were no longer wandering tribes, we were established communities.
河流解决的第二个问题是。. . 消化。
The second issue rivers solve is one of . . . digestion.
仅仅因为某些东西是可食用的并不意味着它可以直接从植物上食用。像生小麦这样的东西当然可以咀嚼，但它们往往会使消化系统的每个部分都变硬，从而导致嘴里流血、肚子里流血、便便里流血。在任何时代都不是好事。
Just because something is edible does not mean that it is edible right off the plant. Things like raw wheat can certainly be chewed, but they tend to be hard on every part of the digestive system, contributing to bloody mouths, bloody stomachs, and bloody poo. Not good things in any age.
可以将生谷物煮成稀粥，这种粥的味道、外观和质地都令人作呕，但煮沸会破坏谷物的营养成分，而且无论如何都需要大量燃料。对于一个到处游荡的部落来说，煮沸可能是一种补充食物流，而且经常有新鲜的木柴供应，而且只有几口人可以养活，但它在终端沙漠山谷中完全行不通。首先，沙漠从来没有很多树。沙漠和树木重叠的地方当然是沿着河流，使燃料采购与农田直接竞争。无论如何，关键是成功的河流农业产生了巨大的当地居民。在没有煤炭或电力的世界里，每天为很多人——对于一个社区——煮食物是不可行的。
Raw grains can be boiled to make a gruel that is disgusting in taste, appearance, and texture, but boiling both wrecks the grains’ nutrient profile and anyway requires substantial fuel. Boiling might work as a supplementary food stream for a tribe that wanders from place to place and often has a supply of fresh firewood and only a few mouths to feed, but it’s a complete nonstarter in a terminal desert valley. Deserts never have many trees in the first place. Where deserts and trees overlap would of course be along rivers, putting fuel sourcing in direct competition with farmlands. Anywho, the point is that successful riverine agriculture generates big local populations. Boiling food for a lot of people—for a community—every day simply isn’t feasible in a world before coal or electricity.
底线？清理土地、挖掘灌溉沟渠、播种、照料庄稼、收割和打谷是早期农业的简单部分。真正残酷的工作是拿两块石头，把你的收获——一次几粒——磨成粗粉，然后可以制成易消化的粥（不需要加热），或者，如果你和一个美食家住在一起，烤成面包。我们唯一可用的力量是肌肉力量——包括人类和我们的动物——以及悲伤的研磨过程的物理学需要大量的劳动，以至于使人类陷入了技术陈规。
Bottom line? Clearing land, digging irrigation trenches, planting seed, tending crops, and harvesting and threshing grain are the easy parts of early agriculture. The really brutal work is getting two pieces of rock and grinding your harvest—a few grains at a time—into a coarse powder that can then be prepared into easily digestible porridge (without needing heat), or, if you lived with a foodie, baked into bread. Our only available power was muscle power—both humans and our critters—and the sad physics of the grinding process required so much labor that it kept humanity in a technological rut.
里弗斯帮我们解决了这个问题。水车使我们能够将河流的一点动能转移到碾磨设备上。只要水在流动，轮子就会转动，一块大石头就会磨另一块，我们只需要把粮食倒进磨碗里。稍后，转瞬即逝！面粉。
Rivers helped us flush this problem. Waterwheels enabled us to transfer a bit of a river’s kinetic energy to a milling apparatus. So long as the water flowed, the wheel would turn, one big rock would grind against another, and we just needed to dump our grain into the grinding bowl. A bit later, presto! Flour.
水车是最初的省力工具。起初，几乎所有的储蓄都被简单地折回到灌溉农业的艰巨工作中，带来了更多的耕地，实现了更大、更可靠的产量。但随着从农场到餐桌的劳动强度有所降低，我们第一次开始产生食物盈余。这也节省了一些劳动力，我们无意中想到了一些事情让他们去做：管理食物过剩。砰！现在我们有了陶器和数字。现在我们需要一些方法来存储我们的骨灰盒并跟踪数学。砰！现在我们有了基础工程和写作。现在我们需要一种方法来分配我们储存的食物。砰！道路。我们所有的东西都需要在一个集中的位置保存、管理和保护，而我们所有的技能需要传给后代。砰！城市化和教育。*
Waterwheels were the original labor saver. At first nearly all that savings was simply folded back into the backbreaking work of irrigated agriculture, bringing more land under cultivation, enabling larger and more reliable yields. But with the farm-to-table process becoming somewhat less labor intensive, we started generating food surpluses for the first time. That too freed up a bit of labor, and we had inadvertently come up with something for them to do: manage the food surpluses. Bam! Now we have pottery and numbers. Now we need some way to store our urns and keep track of the math. Bam! Now we have basic engineering and writing. Now we need a way to distribute our stored food. Bam! Roads. All our stuff needed to be kept, managed, and guarded in a centralized location, while all our skills needed to be passed on to future generations. Bam! Urbanization and education.*
在每个阶段，我们都将一些劳动力从农业中拉出来，投入到管理、利用或改善劳动力最初来自的农业的新产业中。劳动力专业化和城市化水平的稳步提高首先给我们带来了城镇，然后是城邦，然后是王国，最后是帝国。久坐不动的农业可能给了我们更多的热量，而沙漠提供了更好的安全感，但河流的力量让我们走上了文明之路。
At each stage, we pulled a bit of labor out of agriculture and into new industries that managed, leveraged, or improved the very agriculture the labor had originally come from. The steadily increasing levels of labor specialization and urbanization first gave us towns, then city-states, then kingdoms, and eventually empires. Sedentary agriculture may have given us more calories while deserts provided better security, but it took the power of rivers to put us on the road to civilization.
在这些早期的千年里，有。. . 交通不多。
During these early millennia, there . . . wasn’t much traffic.
河流驱动的农业系统可以——而且确实——在世界上的许多河流沿岸出现，但文化享受着松脆的沙漠外衣是稀有鸟类。对于以定居农业为基础的文明，我们的第一个不错的选择是底格里斯河下游、幼发拉底河和尼罗河，印度河中游（今天的巴基斯坦），以及程度较小的黄河上游（今天的中国中北部），以及。. . 就是这样。
River-driven agricultural systems could—and did—pop up all along the world’s many rivers, but cultures enjoying that crunchy desert coating were rare birds. Our first good choices for sedentary agriculture-based civilizations were the Lower Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile, the mid-Indus (today’s Pakistan), and to a lesser degree, the Upper Yellow (that’s today’s north-central China), and . . . that’s about it.
在密苏里河、塞纳河、长江河、恒河或宽扎河沿岸，各种文化或许能够为自己开辟出小生境——或王国，甚至帝国——但没有一种文化能够与邻国保持足够的隔绝以维持下去。其他群体——无论是文明的还是野蛮的——都会在无情的竞争中消耗掉这些回声文化。即使是所有这些回声帝国中最大、最坏的帝国——罗马人——“只有”在早期历史的狗咬狗世界中生存了五个世纪。相比之下，美索不达米亚和埃及都持续了几千年。
Cultures may have been able to carve out niches—or kingdoms, or even empires—for themselves along the Missouri or Seine or Yangtze or Ganges or Kwanza—but none of them would have enough insulation from the neighbors to persevere. Other groups—whether civilized or barbarous—would wear these echo cultures down with unrelenting competition. Even the biggest and most badass of all those echo empires—the Romans—“Only” survived for five centuries in the dog-eat-dog world of early history. In contrast, Mesopotamia and Egypt both lasted multiple millennia.
真正的关键是，下一次技术变革并没有通过隔离人类文化来使它们更持久，而是通过加剧竞争来降低人类文化的持久性。
The real kicker is that the next technological change didn’t make human cultures more durable by insulating them, but instead less durable by ratcheting up the competition.
风的革命
THE WIND REVOLUTION
公元七世纪，人类的铣削技术终于突破了一系列技术障碍，将铣轮与新的动力源结合起来。我们没有使用桨轮到达结构下方以利用流动水的力量，而是使用鳍和帆到达上方并利用流动空气的力量。设备的其余部分——一个曲轴和一对磨削面——或多或少保持不变，但改变了动力源，改变了人类发展可能的地理区域。
In the seventh century CE, humanity’s milling technologies finally ground through a series of technical barriers and married the milling wheel to a new power source. Instead of using paddle wheels to reach below a structure to tap the power of moving water, we used fins and sails to reach above and tap the power of moving air. The rest of the apparatus—a crankshaft and a pair of grinding surfaces—stayed more or less the same, but shifting the power source shifted the geography of where human development was possible.
在水时代，唯一享有剩余劳动力和劳动力专业化的地方是那些锚定在河流系统中的地方。其他所有人都不得不保留大量劳动力来从事艰苦的打磨工作。然而，通过利用风，几乎任何人都可以使用风车来磨面粉。劳动力专业化——以及由此而来的城市化——可以在降雨和偶尔有强风的任何地方发生。没那么多这些较新的文化更加稳定或安全。他们不是。总的来说，他们遭受的战略隔离远低于他们的风前同行。但是风能将农业可以产生剩余劳动力的区域扩大了一百倍。
In the water era, the only places that enjoyed surplus labor and labor specialization were those anchored into river systems. Everyone else had to reserve a chunk of their labor force for the grueling work of grinding. By tapping the wind, however, almost anyone could use a windmill to mill flour. Labor specialization—and from it, urbanization—could occur anywhere with rainfall and the occasional stiff breeze. It wasn’t so much that these newer cultures were more stable or secure. They weren’t. On the whole they suffered from far less strategic insulation than their pre-wind peers. But wind power expanded the zones where farming could generate surplus labor by a factor of one hundred.
这种广泛传播新文化的垃圾邮件产生了一系列后果。
This widespread spamming of new cultures had a rapid-fire series of consequences.
首先，随着成功地理的束缚条款有所放松，文明生活可能变得更加普遍，但生活变得更加不安全。随着城市在雨下和风吹过的地方突然出现，各种文化始终在彼此的脸上出现。战争涉及拥有更好的食物供应和越来越强大的技术的玩家，这意味着战争不仅变得更加普遍，而且还变得更具破坏性。人口的存在第一次与特定的基础设施联系在一起。摧毁风车，你可以让对立的人口挨饿。
First, civilized life may have become far more common as the straitjacket terms for the Geographies of Success loosened somewhat, but life became far less secure. With cities popping up anywhere the rain fell and the wind blew, cultures found themselves in each other’s faces all the time. Wars involved players with better food supplies and increasingly capable technologies, meaning that war didn’t simply become more common, it also became more destructive. For the first time, the existence of a human population was linked to specific pieces of infrastructure. Destroy the windmills and you could starve an opposing population.
其次，正如在向定居农业的转变中，成功的地理环境如何从不同的海拔转移到低洼的沙漠河谷一样，从水力发电到风力发电的转变也有利于不同类型的土地。诀窍是拥有尽可能大的内部边界，并且易于分发。当然，河流仍然很好，但任何类型的大而开阔的平地都可以。平衡这将是很好的、脆弱的外部障碍。沙漠仍然可行，但任何不允许农业的东西就足够了。军队必须步行，而步行者只能携带这么多食物。在这个时代，大多数军队在入侵时都倾向于抢劫，所以如果你的边境没有任何东西可以掠夺，你被入侵的次数就会越来越少。. . 彻底。
Second, just as how in the jump to sedentary agriculture the geography of what generated success shifted from varied elevations to low-lying desert river valleys, the shift from water power to wind power favored different sorts of lands. The trick was to have as big an internal frontier as possible with easy distribution. Rivers were still great, of course, but any sort of large, open flatlands would work. Balancing that would be good, crunchy external barriers. Deserts would still work, but anything that did not allow agriculture would suffice. Armies had to walk, and walkers could only carry so much food. In this era most armies tended to loot their way through their invasions, so if your borderlands didn’t have anything to loot you tended to get invaded less often and less . . . thoroughly.
边境太开放，像蒙古人这样的团体往往会毁了你的生活。世界上的中国和俄罗斯往往做得很糟糕。内部过于崎岖，你永远无法实现足够的文化统一，让每个人都站在同一边。没有人想成为波斯或爱尔兰，不断与内部不和作斗争。金发姑娘的地理位置是那些外表坚固、松脆而中心粘稠的地区：英国、日本、奥斯曼帝国、瑞典。
Too open a frontier and groups like the Mongols tended to ruin your life. The Chinas and Russias of the world tended to do pretty badly. Too rugged an interior and you could never achieve enough cultural unification to put everyone on the same side. No one wanted to be Persia or Ireland, constantly struggling with internal discord. The goldilocks geographies were those with solid, crunchy outsides and gooey centers: England, Japan, the Ottoman Empire, Sweden.
第三，这些新的依赖风的文化不一定会持续更久——事实上，它们中的大多数只是昙花一现——但它们的数量太多了，以至于人类可以产生的熟练劳动力的绝对供应量出现了爆炸式增长，踢了技术进步的步伐进入更高的档位。
Third, these new wind-dependent cultures didn’t necessarily last any longer—in fact, most of them were just pan flashes—but there were so many more of them that the absolute supply of skilled labor that humanity could generate exploded, kicking the pace of technological advancement into a higher gear.
定居农业的第一阶段开始于公元前 11,000 年左右人们或多或少地停车。又过了大约三千年，我们想出了如何驯化动物和小麦。水磨的飞跃终于发生在公元前最后几个世纪（并且由于希腊人和罗马人而得到普及）。研磨风车又用了几个世纪，直到公元 7 世纪和 8 世纪才变得普遍。
The first phase of sedentary agriculture kicked in with people more or less parking around 11,000 BCE. Another roughly three millennia and we figured out how to domesticate both animals and wheat. The jump to watermilling finally happened in the last couple of centuries BCE (and was popularized thanks to the Greeks and Romans). The grinding windmill took several additional centuries, not becoming common until the seventh and eighth centuries CE.
但现在历史加速了。数以万计的原型工程师发现自己不断地修改数十种风车设计，以造福于数以千计的人口稠密地区。所有这些书呆子的工作自然会对许多相关的依赖风力的技术产生附带影响。
But now history sped up. Tens of thousands of proto-engineers found themselves constantly tinkering with dozens of windmill designs for the benefit of thousands of populated areas. All that nerdwork naturally had spin-off effects on a host of related wind-dependent technologies.
最古老的风力技术之一是简单的方形帆。当然，它会产生一点向前运动，但你只能顺着风的方向航行——如果你不想顺着风的方向航行，这是一个很大的限制，或者如果有的话，好吧， 波浪。更大的帆并没有真正的帮助（事实上，更大的织物往往只会让你几乎肯定会翻船）。
One of the oldest wind technologies is the simple, square-rigged sail. Sure, it will generate a bit of forward motion, but you can only sail in the direction the wind is going—a big limitation if you don’t want to go in the direction the wind is blowing, or if there are ever, well, waves. A bigger sail doesn’t really help (in fact, a bigger square of fabric tends to just make you almost certain to capsize).
然而，所有这些用风车进行的新实验都意味着我们对空气动力学的理解一点一点地提高。单桅、单方形帆船让位于多桅帆船，这些帆船拥有一系列令人眼花缭乱的独特帆形，专为不同的水和风条件而设计。改进的运动性、机动性和稳定性能力激发了从造船方法（用钉子，用钉子）到导航技术（不用盯着太阳，用指南针）到武器化（用弓箭）的方方面面的创新，在枪口和大炮中）。
All this new experimentation with windmills, however, meant bit-by-bit improvements in our understanding of air dynamics. Single-masted, single-square sailing vessels gave way to multi-masted vessels with a dizzying array of unique sail shapes designed for different water and wind conditions. The improved locomotion, maneuverability, and stability capacities sparked innovation in everything from ship construction methods (out with pegs, in with nails) to navigation techniques (out with staring at the sun, in with the compass) to weaponization (out with bows and arrows, in with gun ports and cannons).
在“仅仅”八个世纪里，人类在海上的经历发生了翻天覆地的变化。一艘船可以装运的货物数量从几百磅增加到几百吨——不包括武器或船员用品。从北到南穿越地中海的旅行——曾经如此危险以至于被认为是自杀的边缘——只是成为跨洋和环大陆航行多月的第一次小跳跃。
In a “mere” eight centuries humanity’s experience on the sea transformed utterly. The quantity of cargo that a single vessel could ship increased from a few hundred pounds to a few hundred tons—not counting weapons or supplies for the crew. Trips north to south across the Mediterranean—once so dangerous as to be considered borderline suicidal—simply became the first, small hop on multi-month, transoceanic and circumcontinental voyages.
结果是它自己的船队对人类状况造成了后果。
The result was its own flotilla of consequences for the human condition.
可以利用新技术的政治实体在竞争中获得了优势。它们可以产生大量收入流，这些收入流又被用于加强防御、教育民众以及支付扩大的公务员制度和军队的费用。意大利北部的城邦成为与那个时代的帝国不相上下的成熟的独立区域强国。
Political entities that could leverage the new technologies gained an Olympic track of legs up over the competition. They could generate massive income flows, which were in turn used to fortify defenses, educate their populations, and pay for expanded civil services and military forces. The city-states of northern Italy became full-fledged independent regional powers on par with the empires of the era.
进步还在继续。
And the advances sailed on.
在深水航海之前，距离的限制一直被证明是压倒性的，以至于贸易极其罕见。道路只存在于一种文化中，而在大多数文化中，商品的种类不够广泛，无法首先证明大量贸易是合理的。（幸运地拥有通航河流的地方是例外，因此往往是最富有的文化。）成熟的交易物品往往仅限于异国情调的物品：香料、黄金、瓷器——这些物品必须与食品竞争潜在贸易商的货物。
Until deepwater navigation, tyrannies of distance proved so consistently overwhelming that trade was exceedingly rare. Roads only existed within a culture and within most cultures there wasn’t a wide enough variety of goods to justify much trade in the first place. (Places lucky enough to have navigable rivers were the exceptions, and as such tended to be the richest cultures.) Items ripe for trading tended to be limited to the exotic: spices, gold, porcelain—items that had to compete with foodstuffs in the would-be trader’s cargo.
高价值商品产生了自己的问题。有人拉着满载的马车从城外出现要买食物，就相当于当代那个在机场托运行李上贴上纯银行李牌的白痴。*由于食品限制，没有一个商人可以完成整个行程。取而代之的是，贸易采取了数百个中间商的形式，这些中间商像一串珍珠一样沿着崎岖不平的路线串在一起，每个中间商都将自己的价格上涨加到商品成本上。通过丝绸之路等路线进行的跨大陆贸易必然会产生 10,000% 的加价，这是理所当然的。这使贸易商品牢牢地保持在轻质、低体积和不易腐烂的类别中。
High-value goods generated their own problems. Someone showing up from out of town with a loaded wagon asking to buy some food was the equivalent of that idiot in contemporary times who puts a sterling silver luggage tag on his checked bag at the airport.* Because of the food restriction, no single trader could make the whole trip. Instead, trade took the form of hundreds of middlemen laced along rough routes like a string of pearls, with each adding their own price hikes to the goods’ cost. Transcontinental trade via routes like the Silk Roads by necessity generated 10,000 percent markups as a matter of course. That kept trade goods firmly in the categories of lightweight, low bulk, and nonperishable.
深水航行绕过了整个问题。
Deepwater navigation sailed around the entire problem.
新船不仅可以一次在陆地视线之外航行数月，从而减少面临威胁的风险；他们的洞穴限制了他们停下来获取补给的需要。他们可怕的军火库意味着当他们确实需要停下来时，当地人往往不会闲逛，看看他们能偷到什么。中间商的缺乏使奢侈品的成本降低了 90% 以上——而那是在支持新深海贸易商的大国开始派遣军队直接接管世界认为如此宝贵的香料、丝绸和瓷器的来源之前.
The new ships could not just sail out of sight of land for months at a time, reducing exposure to threats; their cavernous holds limited their need to stop for supplies. Their fearsome arsenals meant that when they did need to stop, the locals tended to not wander by and see what they could steal. The lack of middlemen reduced the cost of luxury goods by an excess of 90 percent—and that was before the powers backing the new deepwater traders started dispatching troops to directly take over the sources of the spices and silks and porcelain that the world found so valuable.
更聪明的国家*并不满足于采购和分配，还在航行路线沿线占领了港口，以便他们的货船和军舰有地方避难和补给。利润激增。如果一艘船能够沿途安全地装载补给品，那么它就不需要打包一年的补给品了。这为贵重物品腾出了更多货舱。或者干脆让更多的人带枪，这样他们就可以更好地保护自己。. . 或者拿别人的东西。*
Smarter powers* didn’t content themselves with sourcing and distribution, but also nabbed ports all along the sailing route so that their cargo and military vessels had places to shelter and resupply. Profits surged. If a ship could safely pick up supplies along the way, it wouldn’t need to pack a year’s worth of supplies. That freed up more cargo room for the valuable stuff. Or simply more dudes with guns so they could better protect themselves . . . or take other people’s stuff.*
来自此类商品的收入、商品获取和储蓄使更成功的地区更加强大。拥有大块优质耕地的要求并没有消失，但能够保护自己免受土地攻击的重要性变得更加重要。与海上贸易一样多的钱，码头和船舶的支持基础设施代表了根本上的新技术，只有付出巨大的代价才能加以利用。根据定义，任何用于漂浮商船队的现金都不能用于维持军队。
The income from such goods, goods access, and savings empowered the more successful geographies even more. The requirement of having large high-quality chunks of arable land didn’t go away, but the importance of being able to secure yourself from land attack became far more important. As much money as there was to be made in maritime trade, the support infrastructure of docks and ships represented fundamentally new technologies that could only be exploited with great expense. Any cash dished out to float a merchant fleet would by definition not be available to maintain an army.
新的 Geographies of Success 并不是擅长建造船只或训练水手的地方，而是那些不过度担心土地入侵并拥有战略空间来思考地平线的地方。最早的深水文化位于半岛——葡萄牙和具体到西班牙。当军队只能从一个方向接近你时，你更容易将精力集中在浮动海军上。但以岛屿为基础的国家更具有防御性。随着时间的推移，英国人超过了伊比利亚人。
The new Geographies of Success weren’t places that excelled at building ships or training sailors, but instead were those that weren’t overworried about land invasions and had the strategic space to think over the horizon. The first deepwater cultures sat on peninsulas—Portugal and Spain to be specific. When armies can only approach you from one direction, it is easier to focus your efforts on floating a navy. But countries based on islands are even more defensible. In time, the English surpassed the Iberians.
有很多失败者——可以利用深水技术但不一定能跟上西班牙语或英语的文化。一个包括法国人、瑞典人、意大利人和荷兰人在内的几乎同等群体证明，尽管深水技术在从饮食到财富再到战争的方方面面都具有革命性，但如果每个人都拥有深水技术，它并不一定会打破力量平衡新技术。它所做的是在那些可以实现它的文化和那些不能实现它的文化之间打开了一个巨大的鸿沟掌握新技术。法国和英国无法相互征服，但他们可以——而且确实——航行到遥远的土地，并征服那些无法与他们的技术敏锐度相提并论的人。世界上占主导地位的政治单位迅速从与世隔绝的农业社区演变为遍布全球、以贸易为基础的深水帝国。
There were plenty of also-rans—cultures that could harness deepwater techs but who couldn’t necessarily keep up with the Spanish or English. A near-peer group that included everyone from the French to the Swedes to the Italians to the Dutch demonstrated that as revolutionary as deepwater technology was in everything from diet to wealth to warfare, it didn’t necessarily shatter the balance of power if everyone had the new technologies. What it did do is open a yawning gap between those cultures that could pull it off and those who could not master the new technologies. France and England couldn’t conquer one another, but they could—and did—sail to lands far removed and conquer the shit out of people who couldn’t match their technical acumen. The world’s dominant political unit rapidly evolved from sequestered agricultural communities to globe-spanning, trade-based deepwater empires.
随着贸易路线现在不再以数十英里而是以数千英里来衡量，即使运输成本直线下降，贸易的价值和数量仍呈爆炸式增长。这种变化在两端都打击了城市化趋势。在新的海军工业和令人眼花缭乱的贸易产品之间，帝国需要中心来开发、加工、制造和分销阳光下的一切。对城市化和劳动力专业化的需求从未如此高涨。单位运输成本的下降也为运输木材、纺织品、糖、茶叶等不那么奇特的商品提供了机会。. . 小麦。来自遥远大陆的食品现在可以供应帝国中心。
With trade routes now measured not in tens of miles but thousands, the value and volume of the trade exploded even as the cost of that transport plummeted. The change hit the urbanization trend at both ends. Between the new naval industries and the dizzying array of traded products, the empires needed hubs to develop and process and craft and distribute everything under the sun. Demand for urbanization and labor specialization had never been higher. The collapse in per-unit shipping costs also opened up opportunities to ship far less exotic goods such as lumber, textiles, sugar, tea, or . . . wheat. Foodstuffs from a continent away could now supply Imperial Centers.
这不仅催生了世界上第一批特大城市。它创建了没有人参与农业的城市中心。每个人都从事增值劳动。随之而来的城市化和熟练劳动力供应的爆炸式增长进一步加速了技术曲线。进入深水时代不到两个世纪，伦敦——一座在欧亚大陆尽可能远离丝绸之路贸易中心的城市——成为了世界上最大、最富有、受教育程度最高的城市。
This did more than give rise to the world’s first megacities. It created urban centers where no one was involved in agriculture. Where everyone was engaged in value-added labor. The resultant explosion in urbanization and skilled labor supplies accelerated the technological curve even more. Less than two centuries into its deepwater era, London—a city as far away from the trade hubs of the Silk Roads as is possible in Eurasia—became the world’s largest, richest, and best-educated city.
如此大量的财富和技术技能集中在一个地方，很快就达到了临界质量。英国人靠自己产生了足够多的新技术来启动他们自己的文明转型。
Such a massive concentration of wealth and technical skills in one place quickly reached critical mass. All by themselves, the English generated sufficient new technologies to launch their own civilizational transformation.
工业革命
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
尽管深水时代的技术范围和深度不断扩大，但人类仍然保留着许多从一开始就阻碍进步的局限性。就在 1700 年的“最近”，人类使用的所有能量都属于三个桶之一：肌肉、水或风。前一千三千年可以概括为人类为了更大规模、更高效率地捕捉三种力量，但最后如果风不吹、水不流、肉不喂，休息了，什么都做不了。
Despite the ever-building technological reach and depth of the deepwater era, humanity retained many of the limitations that had hobbled advancement since the beginning. As “recently” as 1700, all energy used by humans fell into one of three buckets: muscle, water, or wind. The previous thirteen millennia can be summed up as humanity’s effort to capture the three forces in larger volumes and with better efficiencies, but in the end if the wind didn’t blow or the water didn’t flow or the meat wasn’t fed and rested, nothing was going to get done.
化石燃料的利用颠覆了这一切。首先燃烧煤炭（然后是石油）以产生蒸汽的能力使人类能够随时随地以所需的数量产生能量。轮船不再需要根据季节环游世界；他们可以随身携带自己的力量。将能源应用的强度和精度提高两个数量级，重新定义了广泛排列的行业，如采矿和冶金、建筑和医药、教育和战争、制造业和农业——每个行业都产生了自己的技术套件，这反过来又改变了人类的体验。
The harnessing of fossil fuels upended it all. The ability to burn first coal (and later oil) to generate steam enabled humans to generate energy when and where and in the quantities desired. Ships no longer needed to sail around the world based on the seasons; they could carry their own power with them. Increasing the strength and precision of energy application by two orders of magnitude redefined industries as broadly arrayed as mining and metallurgy, construction and medicine, education and warfare, manufacturing and agriculture—each generating its own technological suite, which in turn transformed the human experience.
医学的进步不仅改善了健康，还使寿命延长了一倍。混凝土不仅允许真正的道路，它给了我们高楼。*染料的发展不仅催生了化学工业，还直接导致了化肥的出现，使农业产量提高了四倍。钢——比铁更坚固、更轻、更不易碎且更耐腐蚀——提供每个使用金属的行业，无论是运输行业、制造业还是战争行业，都在产能上实现了飞跃。任何使肌肉力量变得不那么必要的东西都有助于为制度化的奴隶制建造棺材。同样，电力不仅提高了工人的生产力，它还产生了制造时间的光。在推迟夜晚的过程中，人们有更多的时间来（学习）阅读，从而扩大了大众的识字率。它使妇女有可能过一种不完全致力于花园、家庭和儿童保育的生活。没有电，就没有女权运动。
Advances in medicine didn’t just improve health, they doubled life spans. Concrete didn’t just allow for real roads, it gave us high-rises.* The development of dyes didn’t just spawn a chemicals industry, it directly led to fertilizers that increased agricultural output by a factor of four. Steel—stronger, lighter, less brittle, and more corrosion-resistant than iron—provided every industry that used metal with a quantum leap in capacity, whether that industry be transport or manufacturing or war. Anything that made muscle power less necessary helped build a coffin for institutionalized slavery. Similarly, electricity didn’t just expand worker productivity, it generated light, which manufactured time. In pushing back the night, people had more hours to (learn to) read, expanding literacy to the masses. It granted women the possibility of a life not utterly committed to garden-, house-, and child-care. No electricity, no women’s rights movements.
这个新工业时代的最大限制不再是肌肉、水或风——甚至一般的能源——而是资本。这个新时代的一切——无论是铁路、公路、装配线、摩天大楼还是战舰——都是新的。它用更轻、更强、更快、更好的东西取代了上千年的基础设施。. . 这必须从头开始构建。这需要钱，而且是很多钱。工业化基础设施的需求需要新的资本动员方法：资本主义、共产主义和法西斯主义都出现了。
The biggest restriction of this new industrial era was no longer muscle, water, or wind—or even energy in general—but instead capital. Everything about this new era—whether it be railroads or highways or assembly lines or skyscrapers or battleships—was, well, new. It replaced the infrastructure of the previous millennia with something lighter, stronger, faster, better . . . and that had to be built up from scratch. That required money, and lots of it. The demands of industrialized infrastructure necessitated new methods of mobilizing capital: capitalism, communism, and fascism all emerged.
将商品从高供应地转移到高需求地的“简单”经济学变得无限复杂，工业化地点提供大量基本独特的产品，而其他工业化地点邻近其他工业化地点，提供同样大量的基本相似的独特产品。扩张只有两个限制：为工业扩建提供资金的能力，以及将扩建产品运输给付费客户的能力。
The “simple” economics of moving goods from places of high supply to high demand became infinitely more complex, with industrialized locations providing massive volumes of fundamentally unique products adjacent to other industrialized locations providing similarly massive volumes of similarly fundamentally unique products. There were only two limitations on expansion: the ability to fund the industrial buildout, and the ability to transport the products of that buildout to paying customers.
成功地理的逻辑也是如此。. . 分裂。一直追溯到从狩猎/采集经济到水车时代的转变，在河边总是更好。那没有改变。但这已经不够了，没有人真正拥有这一切。密集的通航河流网络可以促进当地贸易并产生大量资本，但不足以为当地发展提供资金并购买该发展成果。贸易变得更加重要，两者作为资本来源和客户来源。德国证明在前者中最为成功，莱茵河、易北河、奥得河和多瑙河决定性地证明是工业世界最密集的资本产生区，并将德意志帝国提升为那个时代最强大的参与者。但正是英国统治了海浪，因此获得了使德国成为全球霸主所需的贸易路线和客户。
And so the logic of Geographies of Success . . . split. Stretching all the way back to the shift from hunter/gatherer economics to the age of the waterwheel, it had always been better to be by a river. That had not changed. But it was no longer enough, and no one really had it all. Dense webs of navigable rivers could amp up local trade and generate scads of capital, but never enough to both fund local development and purchase the outcomes of that development. Trade became more important, both as a source of capital and as a source of customers. Germany proved the most successful at the former, with the Rhine, Elbe, Oder, and Danube decisively proving to be the industrial world’s densest capital-generation zone and elevating the German Empire to the era’s most powerful player. But it was Britain who ruled the waves, and therefore access to the trade routes and customers required to make Germany a global hegemon.
深水时代规则所锁定的有利地理格局在工业时代依然稳固。随着工业化，拥有广阔领土的通航水道帝国变得更大、更坚固、更致命。深水航行使这些帝国的影响力遍及全球，而战争的工业化则随着机关枪、飞机和芥子气的出现而变得更加致命。更重要的是，深水航海和工业化的结合使这些深水帝国能够在数天和数小时内而不是数月或数周内相互访问其新的军事能力。并在地球上的任何地方这样做。
The pattern of favored geographies locked in by the rules of the deepwater era held solid in the industrial era. The empires of navigable waterways with far-flung dominions got bigger, tougher, and more lethal as they industrialized. Deepwater navigation made these empires global in reach, while the industrialization of warfare made that reach deadlier with the addition of machine guns, aircraft, and mustard gas. Even more importantly, the combination of deepwater navigation and industrialization enabled these deepwater empires to visit their new military capacities upon each other in a matter not of months and weeks, but days and hours. And to do so at any location on the planet.
从第一次真正的工业冲突——1853-56 年的克里米亚战争、1861-65 年的美国内战和 1866 年的奥普战争——工业时代只用了两代人就产生了最可怕的历史上的大屠杀，在两次世界大战中造成约 1 亿人死亡。从人类的角度来看，战争如此灾难的众多原因之一是，工业革命的技术建设不仅使战争武器更具破坏性，而且还使文化结构、技术专长、经济活力和军事相关性的社会更加依赖人工基础设施。战斗人员将瞄准敌对的民用基础设施，因为正是这些基础设施使战争成为可能。但同样的基础设施也使大众教育、大众就业成为可能，
From the first real industrial conflicts—the Crimean War of 1853–56, the American Civil War of 1861–65, and the Austro-Prussian War of 1866—it didn’t take but two generations for the Industrial Age to generate the most horrific carnage in history, resulting in some 100 million deaths in the two world wars. One of the many reasons why the wars were so catastrophic in human terms was that the technological builds of the Industrial Revolution didn’t simply make the weapons of war more destructive, they made the cultural fabric, technical expertise, economic vitality, and military relevance of society far more dependent upon artificial infrastructure. Combatants would target opposing civilian infrastructure because it was that infrastructure that enabled warfighting. But that same infrastructure also enabled mass education, mass employment, mass health, and an end to mass hunger.
如果有的话，世界大战证明地理仍然很重要。因为当英国、德国、日本、中国、法国和俄罗斯忙于摧毁彼此的风、水和工业相关基础设施时，一个相对较新的民族——在一个新的地理区域——不仅他们不是所有这些大规模破坏的目标，而是利用战争将水、风、深水和工业能力的技术大规模应用到他们的领土上。. . 在许多情况下是第一次。
If anything, the world wars proved that geography still mattered. For while Britain and Germany and Japan and China and France and Russia were busy destroying each other’s wind and water and industrial-related infrastructure, a relatively new people—in a new geography—not only were not a target of all this broad-scale destruction, they were instead using the war to massively apply the technologies of water and wind and deepwater and industrial capacity to their territory . . . in many cases for the first time.
也许你听说过他们。他们被称为美国人。
Maybe you’ve heard of them. They’re called Americans.
进入意外的超级大国
Enter the Accidental Superpower
美国人是一群奇怪的人。
The Americans are an odd lot.
美国人身上有很多东西会引起极大的兴趣和冒犯、讨论和争论、感激和嫉妒、尊重和愤怒。许多人指出，美国经济的活力是美国个人主义、多语言文化的典型体现。其他人强调其作为全球决定因素的军事敏锐度。还有更多人将其宪法的灵活性视为其连续三个世纪取得成功的秘诀。并不是说这些都是不正确的。所有这些当然都有助于美国的毅力。但我更直接一点：
There are a great many things about the Americans that generate a great deal of interest and offense, discussion and argument, gratitude and jealousy, respect and anger. Many point to the dynamism of the American economy as the quintessential manifestation of the United States’ individualistic, polyglot culture. Others emphasize its military acumen as a global determinant. Still more see the flexibility of its constitution as being the secret to its two-going-on-three centuries of success. It isn’t that any of these are incorrect. All certainly contribute to America’s perseverance. But I’m a bit more straightforward:
美国的故事是完美的成功地理学的故事。地理位置不仅决定了美国的实力，也决定了美国在世界上的作用。
The American story is the story of the perfect Geography of Success. That geography determines not only American power, but also America’s role in the world.
美国是历史上最强大的河流强国和陆上强国
THE UNITED STATES IS THE MOST POWERFUL RIVER POWER AND LAND POWER IN HISTORY
顺应当时的技术，美洲殖民地都是农业性质的。它们都不是我们在当代意义上所说的粮仓。康涅狄格州、罗得岛州、马萨诸塞州和新罕布什尔州的新英格兰殖民地土壤稀薄、多岩石、多云天气和短暂的夏季，限制了农业选择。小麦很难拒绝。玉米是一个meh。这核心农业经济是捕鲸、渔业、林业和火球的混合体。*
Conforming to the technologies of the time, the American colonies were all agricultural in nature. None of them were what we would call breadbaskets in the contemporary sense. The New England colonies of Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire suffered from thin, rocky soils, often-cloudy weather, and short summers, limiting farming options. Wheat was a hard no. Corn was a meh. The core agricultural economy was a mix of whaling, fishing, forestry, and Fireball.*
佐治亚州和卡罗来纳州的天气更加适合农场，农业选择范围扩大和改善，但土壤贫瘠的方式不同。皮埃蒙特土壤的主要输入是阿巴拉契亚山脉腐烂的残余物——富含矿物质的粘土，但不一定充满有机养分。自然结果是巡回生产，农民清理土地，在上面种植几个季节的作物，直到营养成分耗尽，然后转移到新的地块。原地踏步，需要人工施肥，这在任何时代都是很辛苦的工作。非标准就业模式，如契约奴役和奴隶制在南方扎根，因为与其他任何事情一样需要改善土壤化学。
Georgia and the Carolinas enjoyed more farm-friendly weather, broadening and bettering agricultural options, but the soil was poor in a different way. Piedmont soils’ primary inputs are the decayed remnants of the Appalachians—clay high in minerals, but not necessarily bursting with organic nutrients. The natural result was roving production, with farmers clearing land, growing crops on it for a few seasons until the nutrient profile was exhausted, and then moving on to a new patch. Staying in one place necessitated hand-applied fertilization, which is backbreaking work in any era. Non-standard employment models such as indentured servitude and slavery took root in the South because of the need to improve soil chemistry as much as anything else.
最初十三人中最好的农田位于大西洋中部的马里兰州、宾夕法尼亚州、弗吉尼亚州、纽约州和新泽西州殖民地。但我们不是在谈论爱荷华州（中西部）或潘帕斯草原（阿根廷）或博斯（法国）的质量水平。*由于缺乏竞争，他们只被认为是“好”。除了这些殖民地的土地和天气条件最差之外，它们还拥有殖民地大部分有用的临海区域：切萨皮克和特拉华湾、长岛海峡以及哈德逊河和特拉华河。密集的水路网络促进了人口（又名城镇）的集中，城镇居民不务农。
The best farmland of the Original Thirteen resided in the Middle Atlantic colonies of Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, New York, and New Jersey. But we aren’t talking about Iowa (midwestern) or Pampas (Argentinian) or Beauce (French) levels of quality.* They were only considered “good” due to a lack of competition. In addition to these colonies having the least-bad mix of land and weather, they also sported the bulk of the colonies’ useful maritime frontage: the Chesapeake and Delaware Bays, Long Island Sound, and the Hudson and Delaware Rivers. The dense waterway network encouraged concentrations of populations (aka towns), and townies don’t farm.
不太理想的农业设置，加上城市化总体方向的地理推动，将艰难拼凑的殖民者推向了明确的非农业方向，从而产生了工艺品和纺织品等增值产品。. . 使他们与英国发生事实上的经济冲突，英国看到了这一点帝国经济的一部分，帝国中心本应占据主导地位。*
Less than ideal setups for farming, combined with geographic nudges in the general direction of urbanization, pushed the hard-scrabble colonists in decidedly nonagricultural directions, leading to value-added products like crafts and textiles . . . something that put them into de facto economic conflict with Britain, who saw that particular part of the imperial economy as something the Imperial Center was supposed to dominate.*
殖民地农业的错综复杂和不断变化的性质需要一些严肃的后勤芭蕾舞。大多数当地的食物分配都是通过沿海海上交通进行的；这是在主要沿海殖民地人口中心之间运送货物的最便宜和最有效的方式。当 1775 年革命到来时，事情明显变得活跃起来，因为美国的殖民霸主控制着世界上最强大的海军。许多殖民地美国人挨饿了六年之久。美国革命可能最终取得了成功，但总而言之，这个新国家的经济状况值得怀疑。
The patchwork and shifting nature of agriculture in the colonies required some serious logistical ballet. Most local food distribution occurred via coastal maritime traffic; it was the cheapest and most effective means of moving goods among largely coastal colonial population centers. When the revolution arrived in 1775, things got decidedly animated, as the Americans’ colonial overlord controlled the world’s most powerful navy. Many colonial Americans went hungry for six long years. The American Revolution may have been successful in the end, but the economics of the new nation was, in a word, questionable.
扩张解决了大部分问题。
Expansion solved most everything.
大中西部地区本身就拥有 200,000 平方英里的世界上最肥沃的农田——比西班牙的土地总面积还要大。中西部的土壤是厚而深的草原土壤，富含养分。中西部正处于温带。冬天带来了昆虫的死亡，这使害虫得到控制，限制了杀虫剂的成本，并迫使每年的土壤再生和分解过程限制了对肥料的需求。完整的四个季节经历几乎保证了充足的降水——包括冬季的降雪——这通常会提供充足的土壤水分，并使该地区西部边缘的补充灌溉成为可能。
The Greater Midwest by itself boasts 200,000 square miles of the world’s most fertile farmland—larger than the total land area of Spain. Midwestern soils are thick, deep prairie soils, laden with nutrients. The Midwest is squarely in the temperate zone. Winter brings insect kills, which keep pests under control, limiting pesticide costs as well as forcing an annual soil regeneration and decomposition process that limits fertilizer needs. The full four-season experience all but guarantees ample precipitation—including snow in the winter—which typically supplies adequate soil moisture and relegates supplemental irrigation to the region’s western fringes.
最初的美国跨阿巴拉契亚移民浪潮通过坎伯兰峡谷汇集，在俄亥俄州领土上留下了最集中的足迹。俄亥俄州可以进入五大湖，因此纽约人有必要建造伊利运河以便在俄亥俄州进行运输通过哈德逊河的农业赏金。下一波大规模的移民浪潮从俄亥俄州扩散到今天的印第安纳州、伊利诺伊州、爱荷华州、威斯康星州和密苏里州。对于新的中西部人来说，通过俄亥俄河和密西西比河向西和向南运送粮食到新奥尔良要容易得多，也便宜得多。从那里出发，通过美国屏障岛的沿海航线前往莫比尔、萨凡纳、查尔斯顿、里士满、巴尔的摩、纽约和波士顿，这是一种便宜、轻松（尽管时间长）的航行。
The initial American cross-Appalachian migration wave funneled through the Cumberland Gap, leaving the most concentrated footprint in the Ohio territory. Ohio had access to the Great Lakes, so it behooved the New Yorkers to construct the Erie Canal in order to ship in Ohioan agricultural bounty via the Hudson. The next big migration wave fanned out from Ohio into what is today Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Missouri. It was far easier—and cheaper—for the new midwesterners to send their grain west and south via the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans. From there it was a cheap, easy (albeit long) sail via America’s barrier islands’ intercoastal route to Mobile and Savannah and Charleston and Richmond and Baltimore and New York and Boston.
在五大湖和大密西西比河之间，前两次大定居浪潮中的每个人都在世界上最好的农田上的世界上最大的通航水道系统 150 英里范围内登陆。数学很简单。对于当代低端掀背车的同等成本（2020 年约为 12,500 美元），一个家庭可以获得政府的土地赠款，Conestoga 自己前往新地区，破土动工，耕种，并在几个月内出口高端产品优质谷物。
Between the Great Lakes and the Greater Mississippi, everyone in those first two big settlement waves landed within 150 miles of the world’s greatest navigable waterway system on some of the world’s best farmland. The math was pretty easy. For the equivalent cost of a contemporary low-end hatchback—about $12,500 in 2020 money—a family could obtain a land grant from the government, Conestoga themselves out to the new territories, break ground, farm, and within several months be exporting high-quality grain.
事实证明，中西部定居点在许多方面都彻底改变了新领土和最初的十三区：
The midwestern settlement proved utterly transformative—both for the new territories and the Original Thirteen—in a host of ways:
- 除了与 1812 年战争期间英国封锁和南北战争结束后的邦联政府垮台有关的短缺这两个例外，饥荒是美洲大陆作为一个独立国家的零经验。粮食生产实在是太可靠了，太无所不在了，而且美国的国内运输系统太高效了，以至于饥荒成为一个有意义的问题。
- With the twin exceptions of shortages related to British blockades during the War of 1812 and Confederate governmental collapse in the Civil War aftermath, famine is something continental Americans have zero experience with as an independent country. Food production is simply too reliable, too omnipresent, and America’s internal transport system too efficient and effective for famine to be a meaningful concern.
- 随着北方能够从中西部获得粮食，中大西洋的大部分地区和几乎所有新英格兰地区都恢复了森林，而剩下的农业往往在中西部——不适合的特种作物，如葡萄、苹果、土豆、甜玉米、蓝莓和蔓越莓。这种去农业化进程解放了劳动力，可以投入到其他项目中。产业化等项目。
- With the North able to access foodstuffs from the Midwest, most of the Middle Atlantic and nearly all the New England fields returned to forest, with what agriculture that remained tending to be in midwestern-inappropriate specialty crops like grapes, apples, potatoes, sweet corn, blueberries, and cranberries. This de-agriculturalization process freed up labor to throw at other projects. Projects like industrialization.
- 中西部的增长也推动南方种植经济作物。种植靛蓝、棉花或烟草比种植小麦或玉米的劳动强度大得多。中西部没有劳动力来实现这一目标，但由于奴隶制，南方做到了。全国各地区专业基于当地经济地理的产出，水运使州内贸易变得廉价和无所不在，产生了迄今为止人类经验中闻所未闻的规模经济。
- Midwestern growth also nudged the South into cash crops. Growing indigo, cotton, or tobacco is far more labor intensive than growing wheat or corn. The Midwest didn’t have the labor to pull it off, but courtesy of slavery, the South did. Each region of the country specialized in outputs based on its local economic geography, with water transport enabling cheap and omnipresent intrastate trade, generating economies of scale heretofore unheard-of in the human experience.
- 新中西部的所有土地都是高质量的，因此定居点之间没有像阿巴拉契亚山脉那样的巨大差距。这种相对密集的定居模式，加上该地区的高生产力和低运输成本，自然导致了中心地带小镇文化的形成。小型银行在整个密西西比河系统中不断涌现，以管理向东海岸和欧洲销售产品所产生的资金。金融深度很快成为一个决定性的美国特征。这不仅使中西部农业在领土和生产力方面稳步扩张，而且还为中美洲提供了在基础设施和教育方面引导早期区域发展所需的资本。
- All the land in the new Midwest was high quality, so there were no massive gaps between settled areas like there were in the Appalachians. This relatively dense settlement pattern, combined with the region’s high productivity and low transport costs, naturally led to the formation of the heartland’s small-town culture. Small banks popped up throughout the Mississippi system to manage the capital generated from product sales to the East Coast and Europe. Financial depth soon became a defining American characteristic. This not only enabled steady expansions in midwestern agriculture in terms of territory and productivity, but it also provided Middle America with the capital required to bootstrap early regional development in terms of infrastructure and education.
- 人员和货物在整个河流网络中的便捷流动迫使美国人经常相互交流，尽管种族背景各不相同，但也为美国文化的统一做出了贡献。
- The easy movement of people and goods throughout the river network forced Americans to interact with one another regularly, contributing to the unification of American culture despite a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds.
- 内战显然打断了这个过程。直到战争结束，中西部才失去通往密西西比海岸间航线的通道。但到 1860 年代后期重建开始时，中西部的农民密度已达到临界质量，源源不断的农产品到达东海岸变成了洪水。一直是该国人口最稠密和工业化程度最高的地区，根本不再需要担心生产自己的食物。中西部的所有粮食都为美国带来了大量资本流入，加速了本已缓慢前进的工业化和城市化进程。
- The Civil War obviously interrupted this process. The Midwest lost access to the Mississippi-intercoastal shipping route until the war’s end. But by the beginning of Reconstruction in the late 1860s, farmer density in the Midwest had reached a critical mass and the steady stream of agricultural products reaching the East Coast became a flood. What had always been the most densely populated and industrialized portion of the country no longer had to worry about producing its own food at all. And all that midwestern grain generated massive capital inflows to the United States, amping up industrialization and urbanization processes that were already lumbering forward.
除了经济、文化、金融、贸易和结构之外，还有安全问题需要考虑。
Beyond economics and culture and finance and trade and structure, there are security issues to consider as well.
美国的领土正是“安全”的定义。在北部，深邃崎岖的森林和巨大的湖泊将大部分美国和加拿大地区隔开人口中心。只有一次，在 1812 年的战争中，美国人与他们的北方邻国开战。即使那更应该被视为一场与加拿大当时的殖民统治者——当时是世界军事超级大国——的战争，而不是美国佬和皇家骑警之间的战争。战后的两个世纪里，美加之间的敌意不仅逐渐让位于中立或友谊，而且演变为联盟和兄弟情谊。*今天的美加边界是世界上巡逻最少、最长的不设防边界。
America’s territory is the very definition of “safe.” To the north, deep, rugged forests and giant lakes separate most American and Canadian population centers. Only once, in the War of 1812, have the Americans fought their northern neighbors. Even that should be more accurately considered as a war with the Canadians’ then-current colonial master—who at the time was the world’s military superpower—than one between the Yanks and Mounties themselves. In the two centuries since the war, American-Canadian hostility has gradually given way to not simply neutrality or friendship, but an evolution into alliance and brotherhood.* The American-Canadian border today is the least-patrolled and longest undefended border in the world.
美国的南部边境实际上更安全，可以抵御常规军事攻击。越过美国南部边境的非法移民是美国政治中的一个问题，这一事实突显了该边境对正式国家权力的敌意。像美墨边境地区这样崎岖不平的高海拔贫瘠地区是最难维持有意义的人口、提供政府服务甚至建设基础设施的地形。*
America’s southern frontier is actually more secure against conventional military attack. The fact that illegal immigration across America’s southern border is an issue in American politics underlines just how hostile that border is to formal state power. Rugged, high-altitude barrens like the American-Mexican border region are among the most difficult topographies in which to maintain meaningful populations, provide government services, or even to build basic infrastructure.*
在这样一个无情的偏远地区采取军事行动无异于自杀。单一的大规模越境入侵——圣安娜在 1835-36 年试图镇压德克萨斯人的叛乱——使墨西哥军队非常虚弱，以至于它被一支只有一半规模的非正规部队全面击败，确保了墨西哥人的成功分裂主义者。
Military action in such an unforgiving, remote area has never been anything other than borderline suicidal. The single large-scale invasion across the border—that of Santa Anna in 1835–36 in his attempt to crush the Texican rebellion—so enervated the Mexican army that it was roundly defeated by an irregular force half its size, guaranteeing success to the Texican secessionists.
难怪十年后，在 1846-48 年的美墨战争期间，美国人只是等到墨西哥军队的大部分人在第二次尝试穿越边境沙漠时已经无路可退，然后才动用海军力量在韦拉克鲁斯空投部队。一场血腥的 250 英里行军之后，墨西哥首都落入美国人手中。
No wonder that a decade later, during the Mexican-American War of 1846–48, the Americans simply waited until the bulk of the Mexican army was past the point of no return in its second attempt at crossing the border deserts before using naval forces to drop troops at Veracruz. One bloody, 250-mile march later and the Mexican capital was in American hands.
美国是历史上最强大的深水力量
THE UNITED STATES IS THE MOST POWERFUL DEEPWATER POWER IN HISTORY
世界上大部分的海洋沿岸都存在一些问题。平坦的海岸线和极端的潮汐变化使可能成为港口的地点暴露在无情的海洋冲击之下，真正史诗般的港口城市相对罕见。除了，也就是说，在美国。北美大陆大西洋沿岸中部的三分之一不仅受到数量惊人的压痕的祝福，这些压痕使选址港口城市变得轻而易举；大多数这些端口位置然后位于后面更能保护美国海岸的半岛或屏障岛屿。从得克萨斯州与墨西哥边境的布朗斯维尔到佛罗里达州尖端的迈阿密，再到切萨皮克湾，单是堰洲岛，美国的天然港口潜力就超过了世界上所有其他大陆的总和。即使没有堰洲岛，美国超世界级的沿海凹陷也提供了从波士顿港到长岛和从普吉特湾到特拉华和旧金山湾的几乎无处不在的屏蔽海上通道。不要忘记那些无处不在的河流：在美国排名前 100 位的港口中，整整一半都在上游——有些甚至长达 2,000英里。
Most of the world’s ocean coasts are somewhat problematic. Flat coastlines and extreme tidal variations expose would-be port locations to such unrelenting oceanic battering that truly epic port cities are a relative rarity. Except, that is, in the United States. The middle third of the North American continent’s Atlantic coast isn’t simply blessed by an egregious number of indentations that make siting port cities child’s play; most of those port locations are then positioned behind peninsulas or barrier islands that shield America’s coasts even more. From Brownsville on the Texas–Mexico border to Miami at Florida’s tip to Chesapeake Bay, the barrier islands alone give the United States more natural port potential than all the world’s other continents combined. Even without the barrier islands, America’s beyond-world-class coastal indentations provide almost omnipresent shielded maritime access from Boston Harbor to the Long Island and Puget Sounds to the Delaware and San Francisco Bays. And don’t forget those omnipresent rivers: of America’s top 100 ports, fully half are upriver—some by as much as 2,000 miles.
然后是一个不那么小的问题，在世界大国中独一无二，只有美国在两大洋沿岸拥有大量人口。从经济和文化的角度来看，这使美国人理所当然地获得了世界大部分地区的贸易和扩张机会。但这里的关键词是“机会”。一方面是美国的太平洋和大西洋沿岸，另一方面是亚洲和欧洲大陆之间的遥远距离意味着不需要互动。如果大洋彼岸的土地因经济衰退或战争而饱受折磨——或者美国人只是感到反社会——美国人完全可以呆在家里。没有伤害，没有犯规。
Then there’s the not-so-little issue that, unique among the world’s major powers, only the United States has major populations on the coasts of two oceans. From economic and cultural angles, this enables the Americans to access trade and expansion opportunities in the bulk of the world as a matter of course. But the key word there is “opportunities.” The vast distances between America’s Pacific and Atlantic shores on one hand and the Asian and European continents on the other means that there is no requirement for interaction. Should the lands across the ocean be racked by recession or war—or should the Americans just be feeling antisocial—the Americans can quite simply stay home. No harm, no foul.
这些遥远的距离也意味着美国在不面临来自其他海洋大国的近距离或中距离威胁的极少数国家中名列前茅。太平洋或大西洋盆地中存在哪些理论上可以用来对北方发动攻击的岛屿美国——太平洋的关岛、夏威夷或阿留申群岛，或大西洋的百慕大、纽芬兰或冰岛——要么被亲密盟友控制，要么被美国人自己控制。
Those vast distances also mean the United States is at the very top of a very short list of countries that face no near- or mid-range threats from other oceanic powers. What islands that exist in the Pacific or Atlantic basins that theoretically could be used to launch an attack on North America—Guam, Hawaii, or the Aleutians in the Pacific, or Bermuda, Newfoundland, or Iceland in the Atlantic—are held either by close allies or the Americans themselves.
美国人——而且只有美国人——有能力按照自己的条件与任一大洋上的任何强国互动，无论这些条件是经济的还是军事的。
The Americans—and the Americans alone—have the capacity to interact with any power on either ocean on their own terms, whether those terms be economic or military.
美国是历史上最强大、最稳定的工业强国
THE UNITED STATES IS THE STRONGEST AND MOST STABLE INDUSTRIAL POWER IN HISTORY
工业化既不便宜也不容易。它需要全面拆除之前发生的事情，并用更高效、更昂贵的钢铁和混凝土代替木材和石头。用装配线、电力、锻钢和可互换零件取代在灯笼灯下劳作的旧工匠。推翻和抛弃不是几十年而是几个世纪的经济、社会和政治传统，并用新系统取而代之，这些系统在许多情况下对一种文化来说就像突然出现无所不在的新技术一样陌生。工业化发生在任何地方，都会带来巨大的破坏，因为关于一个国家如何运作的一切都被抛到了一边，然后强加了全新的系统——通常是从上面强加的。
Industrializing isn’t cheap or easy. It requires a wholesale tearing up of what occurred before and replacing wood and stone with more productive—and more expensive—steel and concrete. Replacing old one-at-a-time craftsmen laboring under lantern light with assembly lines, electricity, forged steel, and interchangeable parts. Overturning and discarding economic, social, and political traditions that stretch back not decades, but centuries, and replacing them with new systems that in many cases are as foreign to a culture as the new technologies that suddenly appear omnipresent. Anywhere industrialization occurs it is massively disruptive, as everything about how a country functions is tossed to the side, with entirely new systems then imposed—typically from above. The financial and social costs are typically the greatest disruptions a culture ever experiences.
在欧洲，几个世纪以来简单的居住早已吞噬了所有可用的土地，提高了其成本。欧洲工人在那片土地的每一寸土地上都从事着活动，增加了他们的成本。对系统的任何更改都需要大量资金，从而增加了成本。任何对土地可用性（如洪水或火灾）或劳动力供应（如罢工或军事冲突）或资本存量（如重要人物移民或经济衰退）产生微小变化的事情都会使平衡，大幅提高每个人的成本，并引发大规模的社会动荡。因此，在前工业时代的大部分时间里，欧洲历史给人一种生活在刀刃上的世界的感觉。. .
In Europe, centuries of simple habitation had long ago gobbled up all available land, raising its cost. European workers were engaged in activities over every inch of that land, raising their cost. Any changes to the system demanded capital in large volume, raising its cost. Anything that made even a small change to the availability of land (like a flood or fire) or the supply of labor (like a strike or military skirmish) or the stock of capital (like someone important emigrating or a recession) would throw off the balance, raise costs dramatically for everyone, and trigger massive social upheaval. Ergo, European history for much of the preindustrial era has the feeling of a world living on a knife edge . . .
. . . 然后，工业技术来到这个世界，打破了各个层面的微妙平衡。结果是社会动荡、革命、骚乱、政治崩溃和战争的雪崩，即使欧洲大陆的国家竞相将新技术应用到他们的系统中，并在这样做的过程中将自己转变为巨大的工业强国。
. . . and then the arrival of industrial technologies to this world tore the delicate balance apart at every level. The result was an avalanche of social upheaval, revolutions, riots, political collapses, and wars even as the countries of the Continent competed to apply the new technologies to their systems and in doing so transform themselves into massive industrial powers.
- 英国的经验导致了全球范围的产品倾销，使大英帝国陷入了与每个大国的尖锐军事冲突。
- The British experience led to product dumping, global in scale, that brought the British Empire into sharp military conflict with every major power.
- 二十世纪初俄罗斯的工业化同时摧毁了地主阶级和农奴阶级，却未能用更好的东西取而代之。由此产生的动荡直接导致了苏联的大规模压迫（它产生了自己的“什么都不好”的味道）。
- Russia’s industrialization in the early twentieth century broke both the landlord and serf classes simultaneously, while failing to replace them with anything better. The resulting turmoil led directly to the mass oppressions of the Soviet Union (which generated its own flavor of not-anything-better).
- 德国飞速发展的工业化改变了该国军事君主的权力，并在瓦解中产阶级的同时催生了工业寡头阶级，引发了一系列革命和内战，为世界大战奠定了基础。
- Germany’s breakneck industrialization transformed the power of the country’s military princes and gave rise to an industrial oligarchic class while shattering the middle class, generating a series of revolutions and civil wars that set the stage for the world wars.
- 日本早期的工业化努力在新兴的工业民族主义者和旧的封建地主之间造成了分裂，导致了武士阶级的消灭和政治制度的激进化——把日本直接当作箭来压迫朝鲜和中国以及轰炸珍珠港。
- Japan’s early industrialization efforts created a schism between the rising industrial-nationalists and the old feudal landlords, resulting in the eradication of the samurai class and the radicalization of the political system—taking Japan straight as an arrow to the oppression of Korea and China and the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
- 中国的进程将权力如此牢牢地集中在少数人手中，以至于释放了大跃进和文化大革命的惨淡恐怖。
- China’s process centralized power so firmly in so few hands that it unleashed the bleak horrors of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
没有一个曾经实现工业化的国家能够在不破坏社会和政治混乱的情况下管理这个过程。工业化是必要的，也是不可避免的，但很难。
No country that has ever industrialized has ever managed the process without crippling social and political mayhem. Industrialization is necessary and unavoidable, but it is hard.
除非你是美国人。要理解其中的原因，首先要了解美国确实是一片富足之地：
Unless you’re American. Understanding the why of that begins with the understanding that the United States truly is a land of plenty:
当工业浪潮在 1800 年代末席卷美国海岸时，美国人才开始大踏步前进。美国的巨大的规模使土地成本低廉。它的河流网络使资本成本保持在较低水平。开放的移民系统使劳动力成本保持在较低水平。工业化前投入的低成本改变了美国工业化的经济学，即使缺乏地方地缘政治竞争意味着从来没有加速工业化的国家安全冲动。*
The Americans were only starting to hit their stride when the industrial wave crashed upon American shores at the end of the 1800s. America’s vast size kept land costs low. Its river network kept capital costs low. An open immigration system kept labor costs low. The low cost of preindustrial inputs changed the economics of industrialization in America, even as the lack of local geopolitical competition meant there was never a national security impulse to accelerate industrialization.*
新技术并没有一下子遍及所有地方，而是首先出现在它们能够获得最大收益的地方：土地和劳动力投入已经更加昂贵的地方，通常是从华盛顿特区北部到波士顿的城市一线. 然后工业化将这些城市连接在一个基础设施网络中。只有到那时，这些基础设施才会开始扩散，形成郊区，或连接较小的城镇，或深入农村。
Instead of hitting everywhere all at once, the new technologies first went where they could get the biggest bang for the buck: places where inputs of land and labor were already more expensive, typically in the line of cities from Washington, D.C., north to Boston. Then industrialization linked these cities together in a webwork of infrastructure. Only then does that infrastructure begin spreading out to generate suburbs, or linking in smaller cities and towns, or plunging deep into the countryside.
德国仅用了不到一代人的时间就实现了工业化和城市化。相比之下，美国直到19世纪60年代才完成农村电气化。从许多方面来看，美国仍未接近完成。如果剔除山脉、苔原和沙漠等不宜居住的土地，美国至今仍是人口密度最低的国家之一。在那些人口密度相似的国家中，大多数最近被掏空了（后苏联共和国），因此有点受骗，或者像美国一样，也是新世界的一部分（加拿大、阿根廷和澳大利亚）。
Germany industrialized and urbanized in barely more than a generation. In comparison, the United States didn’t even finish electrifying the countryside until the 1960s. By many measures, the United States still isn’t even close to finished. If one eliminates lands unsuitable for habitation like mountains, tundra, and deserts, the United States remains among the least densely populated countries even today. Of those in a similar population density category, most have recently hollowed out (post-Soviet republics) and so kind of cheated, or, like the United States, are also part of the New World (Canada, Argentina, and Australia).
仅仅为了达到德国在 1900 年的人口密度，美国就必须将其 20 22人口增加近三倍（这还不包括美国一半的领土——比如落基山脉——人口状况不佳适合沉淀）。工业化可以而且确实在美国发生，但转型速度较慢且不那么不和谐，让美国人几代人去适应变化。
Simply to achieve the degree of population density that Germany had in 1900, the United States would have to nearly triple its 2022 population (and that doesn’t even count the half of American territories—such as the Rocky Mountains—that are not well suited to settling). Industrialization could and did happen in the United States, but the transformation was slower and less jarring, giving Americans generations to adapt to change.
美国的工业飞溅也没有在全球范围内产生巨大影响。在主要大国中独一无二的是，美国人口在不断扩大和富裕。工业产出——尤其是在东北地区和钢铁带——很容易被美国自己的人口吸收。没有必要通过出口来维持地方平衡，因此也没有必要进行大英帝国众所周知（和憎恨）的经济战。当地社区银行为当地发展提供资金的能力阻止了那种让俄罗斯人和中国人遭受重创，或者让日本人和德国人如此激进的中央集权。
America’s industrial splash also didn’t have a huge impact globally. Unique among the major powers, the American population was both expanding and wealthy. Industrial output—particularly in the Northeast and the Steel Belt—could be easily absorbed by America’s own population. There was no need to export to maintain local balances, and so no need for the economic warfare for which the British Empire had become well known (and hated). The ability of local community banks to finance local developments prevented the sort of centralized authorities that so devastated the Russians and Chinese, or that so radicalized the Japanese and Germans.
在整个美国的早期工业时期，该国与全球经济的主要接口仍然是通过其农产品出口。虽然工业革命在 1800 年代后期引入化肥确实增加了产量，但正如工业革命引入现代医学正在延长寿命一样。供应与需求齐头并进。美国人在国际经济中的相对参与度并没有发生很大程度的改变。*
Throughout America’s early industrial period, the country’s primary interface with the global economy remained via its agricultural exports. While the Industrial Revolution’s introduction of chemical fertilizers in the late 1800s certainly increased output, it did so just as the Industrial Revolution’s introduction of modern medicine was lengthening life spans. Supply increased hand in hand with demand. Americans’ relative participation in the international economy simply wasn’t altered to a huge degree.*
美国人当然有（并且有）地区差异和他们自己的寡头问题，但美国的寡头——最臭名昭著的是他们的强盗大亨——在私营部门拥有如此巨大的机会，这在很大程度上是因为仍有如此多的资源需要新陈代谢，他们已经出于商业原因几乎不需要进入政府部门。经济压力不会自动转化为政治压力，反之亦然。
The Americans certainly had (and have) regional disparities and their own oligarchic issues, but America’s oligarchs—most infamously their robber barons—had such massive opportunities in the private sector in large part because there were still so many resources to be metabolized, they had little need to enter government for business reasons. Economic stress did not automatically translate into political stress—or vice versa.
现在是完全不同的东西
And Now for Something Completely Different
直到第二次世界大战开始时，美国人才真正大踏步前进。经过三年的狂热动员，他们不仅成为历史上最强大的远征力量——同时在多个战区开展重大综合军事行动——而且还是在战争结束时占领所有战败国的唯一交战国。
The Americans were only truly hitting their stride when World War II began. After three years of frenetic mobilization they emerged not simply as the most powerful expeditionary power in history—carrying out major integrated military actions in multiple theaters of operation simultaneously—but also as the only belligerent that at war’s end occupied all the defeated powers.
这还不是全部。在通往罗马、柏林和东京的道路上，美国人发现自己控制了三大洲和两个大洋盆地的关键经济、人口和物流节点。在租借协议和直接两栖攻击之间，他们现在拥有所有有意义的发射台，可以在西半球和东半球之间进行攻击。结合他们庞大的战时海军，美国人无意中成为了欧洲和亚洲、金融和农业、工业和贸易、文化和军事问题的决定性因素。
And that wasn’t all. On the roads to Rome, Berlin, and Tokyo, the Americans found themselves in control of key economic, population, and logistic nodes on three continents and two ocean basins. Between lend-lease deals and direct amphibious assaults, they now held all meaningful launching pads for attacks between the Western and Eastern Hemispheres. Combined with their massive wartime navy, the Americans had quite inadvertently become the determining factor in issues European and Asian, financial and agricultural, industrial and trade based, cultural and military.
如果历史上有一个大国可以争取全球统治的时刻——一个新罗马的崛起——就是这个时刻。如果说有充分的理由做出这样的出价，那就是德国枪声平息后第二天与苏联之间出现的带有核色彩的竞争。
If there was a moment in history that a power could have made a bid for global domination—for a new Rome to arise—this was it. And if there was ever a good reason to make such a bid, it was the nuclear-tinged competition that was arising with the Soviets the day after the guns fell silent in Germany.
它没有发生。
It didn’t happen.
相反，美国人向他们的战时盟友提出了一项协议。美国人将使用他们的海军——唯一一支在战争中幸存下来的规模庞大的海军——在全球海洋巡逻并保护所有人的商业。美国人将向盟国的出口产品开放他们的市场——唯一一个在战争中幸存下来的规模市场——这样所有人都可以通过出口重获财富。这美国人将把战略覆盖范围扩大到所有国家，这样美国的朋友就再也不用担心入侵了。
Instead, the Americans offered their wartime allies a deal. The Americans would use their navy—the only navy of size to survive the war—to patrol the global ocean and protect the commerce of all. The Americans would open their market—the only market of size to survive the war—to allied exports so that all could export their way back to wealth. The Americans would extend a strategic blanket over all, so that no friend of America need ever fear invasion again.
只有一个陷阱。你必须在美国人酝酿的冷战中选边站。你可以既安全又富有，随心所欲地发展你的经济和文化，但你必须与美国人站在一起（从技术上讲，站在前面）对抗苏联。美国人没有建立一个全球范围的帝国，而是贿赂了一个联盟来遏制苏联。该协定的统称是布雷顿森林体系，它以新罕布什尔州的滑雪胜地命名，诺曼底登陆后不久，美国人就在这里首次涉足。也许更普遍地称为二战后的自由贸易时代，或简称为全球化。
There was just one catch. You had to pick sides in the Americans’ brewing Cold War. You could be safe and rich and develop your economy and culture however you wanted, but you had to stand with (technically, stand in front of) the Americans versus the Soviets. Instead of forging an empire global in scope, the Americans bribed up an alliance to contain the Soviet Union. The catch-all phrase for the pact is Bretton Woods, named after the New Hampshire ski resort where the Americans first made the pitch shortly after the Normandy invasion. It is perhaps more commonly known as the free-trade era of the post–World War II period, or simply as globalization.
看起来有点像逃避，不是吗？为什么在胜利的边缘，美国人放弃了世界上的帝国机会？
Seems a bit like a copout, doesn’t it? Why, at the very edge of victory, did the Americans give away a worldful of imperial opportunities?
部分原因是数字游戏。1945 年，美国人口大致等于西欧人口总和，而西欧人口又大致等于苏联人口。即使撇开人口稠密的东亚和南亚不谈，美国人在战争结束时不仅缺乏保卫领土的力量，而且简单的数学计算就意味着他们无法召集足够的占领军来建立一个全球帝国。
Partly it was a numbers game. In 1945 the American population was roughly equal to that of the combined Western European population, which was roughly equal to that of the Soviet population. Even leaving teeming East and South Asia aside, not only did the Americans lack the forces at war’s end to keep the territory it held, but simple math meant that they could not muster sufficient occupation forces to make a global empire work.
部分原因是距离比赛。即使有美国海军的力量，大西洋和太平洋也是一些重要的护城河——而且护城河是双向的。在地平线外数千英里范围内维持永久性前沿驻军系统的后勤成本和超支根本不切实际。正如美国人在随后几十年中发现的那样，如果当地人不希望你去那里，就很难占领世界另一端的一个国家。朝鲜、越南、黎巴嫩、伊拉克和阿富汗，如果一次管理一个，美国人往往无法应付。想象一下，占领德国、法国、意大利、土耳其、阿拉伯、伊朗、巴基斯坦、印度、印度尼西亚、马来西亚、日本和中国（以及韩国、越南、黎巴嫩、伊拉克和阿富汗）会是什么样子？一次。
Partly it was a distance contest. Even with the strength of the U.S. Navy, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans are some serious moats—and moats work both ways. The logistical costs and overreach of maintaining permanent forward-positioned garrison systems several thousand miles over the horizon simply wasn’t practical. As the Americans discovered in the decades that followed, it is difficult to occupy a country on the other side of the world if the locals don’t want you there. Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan were often more than the Americans could handle when they were managed one at a time. Imagine what it would have been like to occupy Germany and France and Italy and Turkey and Arabia and Iran and Pakistan and India and Indonesia and Malaysia and Japan and China (and Korea and Vietnam and Lebanon and Iraq and Afghanistan) all at once.
部分原因是地图的问题。苏联是一个庞大的陆基帝国，拥有庞大、行动缓慢的军队。美国军队可能是盟国中最大的军队，但美国主要是海军强国。当美国的大部分军事能力需要水时，与苏联士兵对士兵决斗根本不是一个选择，而且并不是为了在距离最近的友好港口一千英里的地方作战而设计的。
Partly it was a map thing. The Soviet Union was a massive land-based empire that fought with huge, slow-moving armies. America’s military may have been the largest of the Allies, but the United States was primarily a naval power. Duking it out with the Soviets soldier-to-soldier simply wasn’t an option when the bulk of the American military capacity required, well, water, and wasn’t designed to fight a thousand miles from the nearest friendly port.
部分原因是文化冲突。美国是现代世界第一个民主国家。民主国家非常擅长捍卫自己的国家，推翻独裁统治，为真理和正义而战等等。专门设计用来榨干当地人的长期职业？这是一个更难卖。
Partly it was a culture clash. The United States was the modern world’s first democracy. Democracies are pretty good at defending their own and tearing down dictatorships and fighting for truth and justice and all that. Long-term occupations expressly designed to bleed the locals dry? That’s a harder sell.
部分原因是组织不匹配。美国是一个联邦制国家——各州拥有与中央政府一样多的权力——这是有充分理由的。该国安全的地理环境与其丰富的经济地理环境相结合，意味着联邦政府不需要做太多事情。在美国历史的前三代，联邦政府常年负责的只是修建几条道路、管理移民和征收关税。美国人从来没有卓越管理的传统*，因为在他们历史的大部分时间里，他们并不真正需要政府。管理两倍于美国的外国领土本来就非常困难。美国人在政府方面真的很糟糕。
Partly it was an organizational mismatch. The United States is a federation—where the states wield as much power as the national government—for good reason. The country’s safe security geography combined with its rich economic geography meant the federal government didn’t need to do much. For the first three generations of U.S. history, all the federal government was perennially responsible for was building a few roads, regulating immigration, and collecting tariffs. The Americans have never had a tradition of governing excellence* because for much of their history they didn’t really need a government. Managing foreign territories twice the size of the United States would have been, like, really hard. And the Americans are, like, really bad at government.
如果美国不能——或不愿——建立一个帝国来对抗苏联，那么美国人需要足够多的盟友来发挥作用，足够靠近苏联边界以缩短美国的距离，足够熟练的土地以战争为基础的战争，以补偿美国的海军和两栖性质，足够富有以支付他们自己的防御费用，并且如果需要战斗，他们的独立性足以激发他们为之流血。没有如果美国占领军在他们的土地上，美国海关官员在他们的会议室里，这是可能的。
If the United States couldn’t—or wouldn’t—forge an empire to fight the Soviets, then the Americans needed allies that were sufficiently numerous to make a difference, sufficiently proximate to the Soviet border to mitigate America’s distance, sufficiently skilled in land-based warfare to compensate for America’s naval and amphibious nature, sufficiently wealthy to pay for their own defense, and sufficiently motivated by their own independence to bleed for it should fighting be required. None of that would have been possible with American occupation armies on their soils and American customs officials in their boardrooms.
但最重要的是，美国人不想要一个帝国，因为他们已经有了一个帝国。美国北美部分的有用土地的潜力比以前的任何帝国都要大。在战争结束时，美国人不仅还没有完成对它们的新陈代谢；他们不会是几十年。根据人口密度，人们可以（很容易地）争辩说 2022 年的美国人还没有完成。当你可以在底特律和丹佛周围修建一些新道路并获得相同的回报时，为什么要把你的儿子和女儿送到国外去与几十个民族进行日常战斗以维持一个全球帝国？
But most of all, the Americans didn’t want an empire because they already had an empire. The useful lands of the United States’ portion of North America were greater in potential than that of any empire that had come before. And at war’s end the Americans not only were not yet done metabolizing them; they wouldn’t be for decades. Based on population density, one could (easily) argue that the Americans in 2022 are still not done. Why send your sons and daughters abroad to bleed in a day-to-day fight against dozens of peoples to maintain a global empire when you could just build some new roads around Detroit and Denver and get the same payout?
美国与国际关系传统的决裂超出了放弃战后重新结盟的“胜者为王”风格。它还扩展到人类存在本身的本质，导致人类状况的根本重新布线。
The American break with the traditions of international relations went beyond its abandonment of the to-the-winner-go-the-spoils style of post-bellum realignments. It also extended to the nature of human existence itself, resulting in a fundamental rewiring of the human condition.
战争结束时，美国人利用布雷顿森林体系建立了全球化秩序，并从根本上改变了游戏规则。他们没有征服他们的盟友和敌人，而是提供了和平与保护。他们通过将上一个时代几乎所有交战的帝国——在许多情况下是几个世纪以来一直在不断变化的、残酷的竞争中的国家——放在同一个团队中，从而改变了区域地缘政治。帝国间的竞争让位于国家间的合作。布雷顿森林体系参与者之间禁止军事竞争，使前帝国（在许多情况下，他们的前殖民地）能够将他们的努力集中在陆军、海军或边界上，而是集中在基础设施、教育和发展上。
At war’s end the Americans used Bretton Woods to create the globalized Order and fundamentally change the rules of the game. Instead of subjugating their allies and enemies, they offered peace and protection. They transformed regional geopolitics by putting nearly all the warring empires of the previous age—in many cases countries that had been in a shifting, cutthroat competition with one another for centuries—on the same team. Inter-imperial rivalry gave way to inter-state cooperation. Military competition was banned among the Bretton Woods participants, enabling the former empires (and in many cases, their former colonies) to focus their efforts not on armies or navies or borders, but instead on infrastructure and education and development.
每个人都不必为食物或石油而战，而是获得了全球范围的贸易准入。每个人都不必与帝国作战，而是获得了地方自治和安全。与至今为止的一千三千年的历史相比，这已经是一笔不小的数目了。它奏效了。真的很好。在“仅仅”45 年的时间里，布雷顿森林体系不仅成功地遏制了苏联，而且还把它掐死了。布雷顿森林体系创造了人类历史上最长、最深刻的经济增长和稳定时期。
Instead of having to fight for food or oil, everyone gained trade access global in scope. Instead of having to fight off empires, everyone gained local autonomy and safety. Compared to the thirteen millennia of history to this point, it was a pretty good deal. And it worked. Really well. In a “mere” forty-five years the Bretton Woods system succeeded in not just containing the Soviet Union, but in choking it to death. The Bretton Woods system generated the longest and deepest period of economic growth and stability in human history.
或者至少在灾难袭来之前是这样。
Or at least it did until disaster struck.
直到美国人赢了。
Until the Americans won.
1989 年 11 月 9 日，柏林墙倒塌。在接下来的几年里，苏联失去了对中欧卫星的控制，俄罗斯失去了对苏联的控制，莫斯科甚至短暂地失去了对俄罗斯联邦的控制。整个美国联盟网络都在庆祝。派对。游行。*但也出现了新的问题。
On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. Over the course of the next few years the Soviet Union lost control of its Central European satellites, Russia lost control of the Soviet Union, and Moscow even briefly lost control of the Russian Federation. Across the American alliance network, there were celebrations. Parties. Parades.* But there was also a new problem.
布雷顿森林体系不是一个传统的军事联盟。为了与苏联人作战，美国人利用其对海洋的统治地位和优越的经济地理条件购买了一个联盟。美国促成了全球贸易，并为联盟成员的出口提供了一个无底洞的市场。没有敌人，布雷顿森林联盟就失去了存在的理由。为什么期望美国人继续为联盟买单战争什么时候结束？这就像在你的房子付清后继续支付抵押贷款一样。
Bretton Woods was not a traditional military alliance. In order to combat the Soviets, the Americans had used their dominance of the oceans and superior economic geography to purchase an alliance. The United States enabled global trade and provided a bottomless market for alliance members’ exports. Without a foe, the Bretton Woods alliance lost its reason to be. Why expect the Americans to continue paying for an alliance when the war was over? It would be like continuing to make mortgage payments even after your house is paid for.
随着 20 世纪 90 年代的展开，美国人有点懒洋洋地进入了一个无定形的中间区域。只要欧洲人和日本人在区域防御计划方面给予他们尊重，他们就会继续维护秩序。考虑到苏联解体，俄国人乱了，伊斯兰世界或多或少平静了，欧洲人的成本似乎很低，收益却很高。北约联盟面临的最大问题是南斯拉夫的解体，这是一个相当深奥的事件，其溢出效应并未威胁到单个北约国家的安全。中东最热门的事件是偶尔爆发的巴以冲突。在亚洲，随着毛泽东崇拜的瓦解，中国可能正在崛起，但将中国视为一个严肃的军事大国是近乎可笑的。在如此良性环境下，
As the 1990s unfolded, the Americans somewhat lazily segued into an amorphous middle area. They would continue to uphold the Order so long as the Europeans and Japanese granted them deference in regional defense planning. Given that the Soviet Union was gone, the Russians were in disarray, and the Islamic world was more or less quiet, the costs to the Europeans seemed low and the benefits high. The biggest issue the NATO alliance faced was the disintegration of Yugoslavia, a rather esoteric event whose spillover didn’t threaten the security of a single NATO country. The hottest event in the Middle East was the occasional pop of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In Asia, China may have been rising with the unwinding of the Mao cult, but to think of China as a serious military power was borderline laughable. In such a benign environment, no one thought much about rocking the proverbial boat.
对大多数人来说，1990 年代是美好的十年。美国提供的强大安全保障。没有严重的国际冲突。全球贸易深入到前苏联地区以及那些尽最大努力避开冷战的国家。美国监管和市场准入的成本稳步上升，但在和平与繁荣的环境中，这一切似乎都是可以控制的。德国重新统一。欧洲重新统一。亚洲虎怒吼。中国发挥了自己的作用，压低了消费品的价格。资源生产商，无论是在非洲、拉丁美洲还是澳大利亚，都赚了大笔钱，帮助世界更多地区实现工业化。遍布全球的供应链使数字革命不仅成为可能，而且不可避免。美好时光。我们都开始认为这是正常的。
The 1990s were a nice decade for most. Strong American-provided security. No serious international conflicts. Global trade penetrated deep into the former Soviet space as well as into countries that had done their best to sit out the Cold War. The cost of the American overwatch and market access steadily expanded, but in an environment of peace and prosperity it all seemed manageable. Germany reunified. Europe reunified. The Asian tigers roared. China came into its own, driving down the price of consumer products. Resource producers, whether in Africa, Latin America, or Down Under, made scads of money helping more parts of the world industrialize. Globe-spanning supply chains made the Digital Revolution not simply possible, but inevitable. Good times. We all came to think of it as normal.
它不是。
It is not.
后冷战时代之所以成为可能，只是因为美国始终致力于中止地缘政治竞争并支持全球秩序的安全范式。随着冷战安全环境的改变，这是一个不再符合需要的政策。我们都认为正常的，其实是人类历史上最扭曲的时刻。这使得它非常脆弱。
The post–Cold War era is possible only because of a lingering American commitment to a security paradigm that suspends geopolitical competition and subsidizes the global Order. With the Cold War security environment changed, it is a policy that no longer matches needs. What we all think of as normal is actually the most distorted moment in human history. That makes it incredibly fragile.
一切都结束了。
And it is over.
我们的故事
The Story of . . . Us
不同的人表现不同。我不是在谈论地理因素在罗马尼亚人、俄罗斯人、卢旺达人和罗斯威尔人等不同群体之间造成的文化差异。相反，我正在考虑社会中的水平层次：基于年龄的差异。
Different people behave differently. I’m not talking about the cultural differences geography causes among groups as diverse as Romanians and Russians and Rwandans and Roswellians. Instead I’m thinking about the horizontal layers within a society: differences based on age.
孩子们的行为不同于大学毕业后的人群，也不同于中年父母，也不同于空巢老人和退休人员。把它们叠加起来，你就会得到一个现代经济。将它们分开，您可以识别出困扰全球系统的许多当代趋势。现代人口结构——专业术语是“人口统计”——是工业革命的直接结果。
Kids act different than the postcollege crowd than middle-aged parents than empty-nesters than retirees. Stack them up and you get a modern economy. Hive them apart and you can identify many of the contemporary trends racking the global system. Modern population structures—the technical term is “demographics”—are a direct outcome of the Industrial Revolution.
放弃农场
DITCHING THE FARM
我们住在哪里很重要。二战后时代的一个决定性特征是大规模城市化。这种城市化进程在不同时代以不同的方式以不同的速度发生。在很大程度上，差异化因素是时间。并非工业革命中的所有事情都是同时发生的。
It matters where we live. One of the defining traits of the post–World War II era is mass urbanization. This urbanization process occurred in diverse ways at distinct rates in various eras. In large part the differentiator is time. Not everything in the Industrial Revolution happened at once.
普遍接受的工业革命的第一步发生在沉睡的纺织品世界。工业化前的纺织工作通常是家庭手工业。各种不同的植物和动物输入需要各种不同的加工方法，从切割到破碎到清棉到起草到煮沸到沤麻到剪切到梳理。一旦原材料经过一定程度的加工，就可以将其纺成或纺成纱线或线，合股成更粗的纱线，最后用织机织成布或针织或钩编。这有点乏味，劳动密集型的定义，很少有人真正喜欢它。*
The generally accepted first step of the Industrial Revolution occurred in the sleepy world of textiles. Preindustrial textile work was typically a cottage industry. A variety of different plant and animal inputs required a variety of different processing methods, ranging from cutting to breaking to scutching to heckling to boiling to retting to shearing to carding. Once the raw material had been somewhat processed, it could be spun or thrown into yarn or thread, plied into thicker yarn, and finally either woven into cloth with a loom or knitted or crocheted. It was all kind of tedious, the very definition of labor intensive, and few ever really enjoyed it.*
这并不意味着没有钱可赚，英国人首先对大规模感兴趣。它首先使用极其廉价的印度劳动力（这是南亚“印度人”，而不是北美“印度人”）来完成所有乏味、烦人的工作。东印度公司成立于 1600 年，旨在引进香料使英国食物不那么令人心碎，到本世纪末转变为更加专注于在整个帝国分销印度布料。帝国公民都意识到棉花、平纹细布、印花布——甚至是丝绸的触手可及的荣耀。尝过别人的劳动带来的利润，发现几乎所有来自印度的东西都比英国本土纺织业使用的羊毛好，种族开始把一切都做得更好。
That hardly means there wasn’t money to be made, with the British the first to become interested at scale. It began by using ultracheap Indian labor (that’s South Asian “Indian,” not North American “Indian”) to do all the tedious, annoying work. The East India Company, founded in 1600 to bring in spices to make English food less soul-crushing, transitioned by the century’s end to more heavily focus on distributing Indian cloth throughout the empire. Imperial citizens all became aware of the accessible glory of cotton, muslin, calico—even silk. Having tasted the profits of someone else’s labor, and having discovered that pretty much everything out of India was better than the wool that was used in Britain’s homegrown textile industry, the race began to do everything better.
随着 1700 年代的到来，英国人开始进口棉花——最初是从印度次大陆进口棉花，后来是美国殖民地——后来又是美国——并开始建立更大规模的家庭式纺织行业。随着时间的流逝，棉花加工和纺织品制造的利润不断增长，工人和老板们开发了新奇的方法来提高生产率、复杂性和耐用性。飞梭、纺车、水车、珍妮纺纱机、纺骡机、蒸汽动力、轧棉机、提花织机、变速棉棒、合成染料。一项一项的新发明增加了速度、体积和价值方面的可能性。到 1800 年，所有这些发明（以及更多）在英国广泛传播。
As the 1700s rolled on, the British began importing cotton—at first from the Indian subcontinent and later the American colonies–turned–United States—and started building a larger-scale cottage-cum-guild industry for textiles. As the years ticked by and profits from cotton processing and textile manufacture grew, workers and bosses developed newfangled ways of increasing productivity, complexity, and durability. Flying shuttles, spinning wheels, water frames, spinning jennies, spinning mules, steam power, cotton gins, Jacquard looms, variable-speed battons, synthetic dyes. One by one the new inventions increased what was possible in terms of speed, volume, and value. By 1800 all these inventions (and more) were widespread throughout Britain.
发明建立在发明之上，以至于在 1800 年代初期，棉制品占英国出口价值的 40%。他们也不是故事的结局。与此同时，英国人正在试验一百万种不同的纺纱、编织和缝纫方法，他们正在进行从木炭到焦炭到煤、从生铁到熟铁、铸铁到钢、从水车到蒸汽的过渡引擎。手工工具让位于车床和铣床，这些机器可以制造能够制造化学品的仪器。
Inventions built upon inventions to the point that in the early 1800s, cotton goods accounted for 40 percent of the value of British exports. Nor were they the end of the story. At the same time the British were experimenting with a million variations of how to spin, weave, and sew, they were making the transition from charcoal to coke to coal, from pig iron to wrought iron to cast iron to steel, from waterwheels to steam engines. Hand-made tools gave way to lathes and milling machines that could make the instruments that enabled the fabrication of chemicals.
一点一点地，人们在这些新技术的开发、操作和改进中找到了工作。几乎所有的新技术都需要在特定的工作地点与已安装的设备进行大规模托管。旧的家庭纺织系统以农场或牧场为基础和风力（或更可能是人力）动力。新的工业条件是基于城市和煤炭驱动的。随着人们追逐金钱，农村变得枯竭。城镇变成了城市。人口的新集中产生了他们自己的挑战，需要在医药、卫生、运输和物流领域进行需求和创新。这数百项技术改进中的每一项都改变了人类与经济、资源和地点的关系。
Bit by bit, people found employment in the development and operationalization and refinement of these new techniques. Nearly all the new technologies required mass colocation at specific work sites with installed equipment. The old cottage textile system was farm- or ranch-based and wind- (or more likely, human-) powered. The new industrial conditions were urban-based and coal-driven. The countryside drained as people chased the money. Towns became cities. The new concentrations of people generated their own challenges, necessitating demand for and innovations in the fields of medicine, sanitation, transport, and logistics. And each of these hundreds of technological improvements altered the relationship of humans to economics and resources and place.
政府开始促进或提供大众服务——从电力到医疗保健的一切——这些服务在密集的城市足迹比在分散的农村更容易提供。人们成群结队地从农场搬到城市，寻求他们认为以更少的个人努力支出获得更高生活水平的东西。
Governments started facilitating or providing mass services—everything from electricity to health care—and those services are easier to provide in dense urban footprints than across the scattered countryside. People moved en masse off the farm to the cities, seeking what they perceived as higher standards of living for less of an outlay of personal effort.
工业革命的第二个方面证明，平等善于改变人与地之间的关系：化肥、杀虫剂和除草剂的发展。一旦它们在 1800 年代中期被引入，每英亩的农业产量就会增加三倍（或更多），同时减少劳动力投入。农业经济发生了不可逆转的变化。不再是城镇将人们从农场拉走，而是现在是农场将人们推向城市。
A second aspect of the Industrial Revolution proved equality adept at changing people-versus-geography relationships: the development of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. Once they were introduced in the mid-1800s it was fairly common to see agricultural output per acre triple (or more) while simultaneously reducing labor inputs. The economics of agriculture shifted irrevocably. It was no longer the towns pulling people from the farms, but now the farms were pushing people into the cities.
新的城市工业和新的高生产力农村的净效应让我们所有人走上了城市生活的道路，产生了人类今天仍在努力解决的一系列问题。到目前为止，最显着的影响是对出生率的影响。在农场，生孩子往往更多的是经济决定，而不是爱情决定。儿童是免费劳动力，事实上与父母的经济需求挂钩。有一种理解——植根于几千年的文化和经济规范——孩子们要么在父母年老时接管农场，要么至少不会搬到那么远的地方。大家庭形成了一个始终相互支持的部落。自有记载的历史以来，这种文化经济动力一直存在，
The net effect of the new urban industries and the newly hyperproductive countryside started all of us down the road to city living, spawning a host of issues the human race is still grappling with today. By far the most dramatic impact has been on birth rates. On the farm, having children was often more an economic decision than it was about love. Children were free labor that were de facto chained to their parents’ economic needs. There was an understanding—rooted in millennia of cultural and economic norms—that children would either take over the farm as their parents aged, or at least not move all that far away. The extended family formed a tribe that consistently supported one another. This cultural-economic dynamic has held true since the dawn of recorded history, even to and through the consolidation of the world into empires and nation-states.
令我妈妈懊恼的是，城市化把这些规范抛到了脑后窗户。从一个庞大的农场搬到一个小镇四分之一英亩的土地上——更不用说人口稠密的大都市里的高层公寓了——儿童经济崩溃了。孩子们不再有那么多工作要做。然而，孩子们仍然需要穿衣和吃饭。由于农场的产量不再触手可及，必须支付食物费用。即使有暑期工作和送纸路线，最好的父母也可以希望他们的 mini-me 的财务状况为净零。
Much to my mom’s chagrin, urbanization tossed those norms out the window. Move from a sprawling farm into a quarter-acre plot in a small town—much less a high-rise condo in a dense metropolis—and the economics of children collapse. There is no longer all that much work for the kids to do. Yet the kids still need to be clothed and fed. With the farm’s output no longer at the parents’ fingertips, food must be paid for. Even with summer jobs and paper routes, the best parents can hope for as regards their mini-me’s is a net-zero financial position.
从小镇搬到城市，孩子们迅速 (d) 进化（从经济角度）成为真正昂贵的谈话对象。当孩子们终于搬出去时，不止一位家长流下了悲伤喜悦的泪水，但如果这样的搬离发生在一个前工业化的、勉强维持生计的农场，往往不会有那么大的恐慌。当生育孩子的大部分经济理由消失时，人们会自然而然地做事：生孩子的数量会减少。
Move from the small town to the city, and children quickly (d)evolved (in economic terms) into being little more than really pricy conversation pieces. And while more than one parent cries tears of sad joy when the kids finally move out, there tends to be little of the panic that would have occurred had such vacating happened on a preindustrial, near-subsistence-level farm. When much of the economic rationale for having children evaporates, people do what comes naturally: they have fewer of them.
然而，人口在整个工业化过程中都在增长。部分原因显而易见：分配系统得到极大改善，加上合成杀虫剂和除草剂（尤其是化肥）的开发和应用，粮食生产越来越可靠，消除了饥荒的上限。
And yet, populations grew throughout the industrialization process. Part of the reason for this is obvious: vastly improved distribution systems, combined with the development and application of synthetic pesticides and herbicides and especially fertilizers, generated more and more reliable food production, removing the famine cap.
部分情况并非如此：下水道处理废物，减少疾病的发生。城镇生活减少了事故并改善了获得医疗保健的机会，降低了死亡率——尤其是婴儿死亡率。更好的药物减少了已经不太常见的疾病和伤害造成的死亡。所有延长的寿命。平均寿命翻倍，在一代人中人口翻了一番，这与生育更多孩子的人无关，因为他们有更多的生育年限可以度过。
Part of this is less so: Sewers disposed of waste, reducing incidence of disease. Town living reduced accidents and improved access to medical care, reducing mortality—especially infant mortality. Better medicines reduced deaths from already-less-common disease and injury. All expanded life spans. Double the average life span and in a generation you have doubled the population, independent of people having more kids, because they have more child-bearing years to live through.
但这并不是一下子发生的。以动力织机为例，它通常被认为是早期突破中最重要的突破，将每工时的产量提高了50倍。第一个原型建于 1785 年，但它最终经历了 50年的 17 个不同阶段的改进。即便如此，也花了将近一个世纪的时间进行修修补补，才使织布机实现了全自动，这样在梭子用完材料时就不需要关闭整个操作。
But it isn’t like this all happened all at once. Take the power loom, which is generally credited as being the most significant of the early breakthroughs, increasing output per worker hour by a factor of fifty. The first prototype was built in 1785, but it ultimately went through five decades of refinement in seventeen distinct phases. Even then it took nearly another century of tinkering to make the loom fully automatic so that the whole operation didn’t need to be shut down when the shuttle ran out of material.
工业革命的“革命”部分用词不当。新技术并不是一下子神奇地开发或应用的，而是设计、制作原型、完善、批量生产和大量应用，然后在200年的时间里，它们又诞生了子孙技术。从农场到城镇的转变需要时间。伦敦成长为世界上最大、最富有、受教育程度最高的城市需要时间。文化和经济规范的转变需要时间，从文化和经济规范转变为孩子被认为吵闹得令人讨厌、移动安全隐患令人讨厌、60 岁很常见的小家庭，这些大家庭有后备子女，成年人平均死于 30 多岁。英国本土人口的两倍需要时间。
The “Revolution” part of the Industrial Revolution is a bit of a misnomer. The new techs weren’t magically developed or applied at once, but instead designed, prototyped, perfected, mass produced, and mass applied, and in turn they gave birth to daughter and granddaughter technologies over the course of two hundred years. The shift from the farm to the town took time. The growing of London into the world’s largest, richest, most educated city took time. The transformation of cultural and economic norms of huge families flush with backup children, where the average adult died in his thirties, to tiny families where kids were considered obnoxiously loud and annoyingly mobile safety hazards and where sixty-year-olds were common took time. The tripling of the British home population took time.
对于英国人来说，整个转变经历了七代人。
For the British, the entire transformation took seven generations.
但仅限于英国人。
But only for the British.
历史加速
History Speeds Up
英国人开发的任何工业技术都注定不会纯属英国。正如以前定居农业、水、风和深水时代的技术向外扩散一样，纺织、蒸汽、钢铁、电力和化肥等工业技术也向外扩散。由于开发和实施这些新技术的大部分工作已经完成，它们在新土地上的应用速度要快得多，这也意味着它们对人口结构的影响更快。
Nothing about the industrial technologies the British developed was destined to remain purely British. Just as the previous technologies of the sedentary agriculture, water, wind, and deepwater eras diffused outward, so too did the industrial techs of textiles, steam, steel, electricity, and fertilizer. Because much of the work on developing and operationalizing these new techs had already been done, their application in new lands was much faster, which also means their impacts upon demographic structures were faster.
第二个经历大规模工业化转型的主要国家是德国。在 1914 年第一次世界大战之前的一个世纪里，德国迅速从一个支离破碎的、前工业化的、以行会为基础的经济体系发展成为一个统一的工业、经济、技术和军事强国，这个体系经常被邻国掠夺。在令人震惊的短时间内击败了丹麦、奥地利和法国。由于工业化和城市化进程，德国人口和之前的英国人口一样几乎翻了三倍。德国人口和之前的英国人口一样，由于较低的死亡率而老龄化。德国人口和之前的英国人口一样，出生率直线下降。但是因为德国人口不像在它之前的英国人口，可以走一条别人开辟的道路，从头到尾的整个过程只发生了四代人。*
The second major country to experience the mass transformation of industrialization was Germany. In the century leading up to World War I in 1914, Germany rapidly evolved from a shattered, preindustrial, guild-based economic system, which was often preyed upon by its neighbors, to a united industrial, economic, technological, and military powerhouse that had in shockingly short order defeated Denmark, Austria, and France. The German population, like the British population before it, nearly tripled due to the industrialization and urbanization process. The German population, like the British population before it, aged due to lower mortality rates. The German population, like the British population before it, saw its birth rates plummet. But because the German population, unlike the British population before it, could follow a path blazed by others, the entire process from tip to tail occurred in just four generations.*
纵观英国和德国的经验，另外三个完全不相关的问题强化了工业化引发的城市化趋势。
Throughout the British and German experiences, three additional—and completely unrelated—issues intensified the urbanization trends that industrialization launched.
首先是女权运动的兴起。
First was the rise of the women’s rights movement.
从本质上讲，妇女权利运动直到 1848 年的欧洲革命才真正获得关注。工业时代的技术在整个欧洲引发了大规模的经济和政治动荡，最终导致一系列激烈的内战，因为旧的政治和社会结构国家内部和国家之间都在努力遏制陌生的压力。新技术都有一个共同点：它们需要人，而且需要很多人。一些新技术，比如新装配线，需要大量非熟练劳动力。其他行业，例如石化行业，要求人们真正知道他们在做什么，因为，你知道，爆炸。但对于所有类别的劳动力来说，新需求推高了劳动力成本。撇开文化、伦理和道德不谈，无论是男人在城里的工厂工作时女人照料农场，还是女人自己在新的工业纺织工厂工作，在那里她们可以轻松赚到比一个魁梧的小伙子多一倍的收入回到农场，现在有一个经济理由让妇女成为自己生活的情妇。
At its core, the women’s rights movement didn’t really gain traction until the European revolutions of 1848. The technologies of the industrial era spawned massive economic and political upheaval across Europe, culminating in a series of intense civil wars as old political and social structures within and across countries struggled to contain unfamiliar pressures. The new technologies all had one thing in common: they required people, and lots of them. Some of the new techs, like the new assembly lines, required largely unskilled labor. Others, such as petrochemicals, demanded people who really knew what they were doing, because, you know, explosions. But for all classes of labor the new demand drove labor costs up. Culture and ethics and morality aside, whether it was women looking after the farm as the men took factory jobs in town, or the women themselves taking positions at the new industrial textile factories where they could easily earn more than double the income of a strapping lad back on the farm, there was now an economic case for women to be mistresses of their own lives.
在传统社会中，女性往往会嫁到一个非常具体的地点：农场和家里。如果有饥荒或战争，是男人冒险去乞讨或战斗，而女人则留下来照顾家庭。这种限制确保了女性通常。. . 可用的。因此，在前工业社会，一名妇女一生生育六个以上的孩子是很常见的。但要打破与家庭和农业的联系。启用大众女性教育。让妇女赚取自己的收入。即使是渴望大家庭的女性也很快发现职业往往会被排挤他们待办事项清单上的其他项目，部分原因是——不管意图如何——每周在工厂工作几十个小时会减少怀孕的机会。
In traditional societies women tend to be wed to a very specific physical location: farm and home. If there is a famine or war, it is the men who venture forth to scrounge or battle, while the women remain behind to care for the household. Such restrictions ensured women were typically . . . available. As such, in preindustrial societies it was very common for a woman to bear more than six children during the course of her life. But break the link to the household and agriculture. Enable mass female education. Allow women to earn their own income. Even women desiring large families quickly discovered that careers tend to crowd out other items on their to-do lists, in part because—regardless of intent—spending a few dozen hours a week at factory job reduces the opportunities for pregnancy.
鼓励生育率下降的第二个因素位于妇女权利和工业技术的交叉点：节育。在工业革命之前的日子里，最可靠的节育方法是把握好时机。工业化扩大了选项列表。1845 年，美国政府授予查尔斯·固特异 (Charles Goodyear) 一项橡胶硫化专利*，这使该行业走上了制造廉价、可靠的避孕套的道路。将这些进步与早期的女权运动相结合，女性的政治和经济明星开始长期崛起——但代价是总体生育率下降。
The second factor encouraging a collapsing birth rate sits at the intersection of women’s rights and industrial technologies: birth control. In the days before the Industrial Revolution, the most reliable method of birth control was good timing. Industrialization expanded the options list. In 1845 the U.S. government awarded a patent for rubber vulcanization to Charles Goodyear,* which set industry on the path to making cheap, reliable condoms. Combine such advances with the early women’s rights movements, and the political and economic stars of the fairer sex began their long rise—but at the cost of overall fertility rates.
压低出生率的第三个附带因素可以归咎于美国人为其二战后国际秩序制定的宏伟计划。在世界大战摧毁旧体系之前，城市化趋势已经全速前进，但随着自由贸易秩序的建立，世界上最发达的经济体——尤其是西欧和日本——不再背负着不断变化的世界。 ，高速战争。各国可以专注于他们最擅长的事情（或者至少，他们最想做的事情），而 Order 的安全平静使他们能够从半个世界之外进口食物。
The third incidental factor depressing birth rates can be laid at the feet of the Americans’ grand plan for their post–World War II international Order. The urbanization trend was already going full steam before the world wars blasted the old system apart, but with the onset of the free trade Order, the world’s most advanced economies—most notably Western Europe and Japan—were no longer burdened with a world of constant, high-velocity war. Countries could focus on what they did best (or at least, what they wanted to do best), and the security placidity of the Order enabled them to import food from half a world away.
布雷顿森林体系全球化进程的本质是通过挤压工业化世界的农业部门来压低出生率。在自由贸易之前的世界里，大规模进口食品很少是可行的、大规模的选择。这推动了政府的经济和战略计算。
The very nature of the Bretton Woods globalization process depressed birth rates by squeezing the agricultural sector across the industrialized world. In the pre–free trade world, importing food en masse was rarely a viable, large-scale option. That drove government calculations both economic and strategic.
多云、短夏的德国几乎不以其丰富的农业系统而闻名，但在 1945 年前欧洲的普遍混战中，德国人别无选择，只能从他们蹩脚的土地上榨取尽可能多的蹩脚食物来维持生存状态。*大不列颠以其食物而闻名，只是因为食物太糟糕了——只是因为这个地方是一个岛屿，所以它能够走另一条路。到 19 世纪后期，帝国制度使英国人能够从远离欧洲的殖民地采购食物。根据十年的不同，这意味着埃及、*南非、*印度、*或澳大利亚和新西兰。*这种采购选择使英国人不仅可以将精力集中在工业革命的制造业方面，还可以从一个遍布全球的帝国中获益。
Cloudy, short-summer Germany is hardly known for its rich agricultural system, but in the general melee that was pre-1945 Europe, the Germans had no choice but to wring out as much crappy food from their crappy land as was required for the survival of the state.* Great Britain—known for its food only because the food is so bad—was able to take a different road only because the place is an island. By the late nineteenth century, the imperial system enabled the Brits to source their food from colonies far removed from Europe. Depending on the decade, that meant Egypt,* South Africa,* India,* or Australia and New Zealand.* Such sourcing options enabled the Brits to not only focus their energies on the manufacturing side of the Industrial Revolution, but also gain the benefits from a globe-spanning empire to boot.
骑士团彻底颠覆了这个系统。通过加强全球安全，打破帝国，开放贸易，促进工业革命农业技术的传播，美国人无意中将世界引入了“全球”农业。一个国家不再需要征服一些遥远的农田来保证粮食安全。旧帝国网络的一部分现在可以最大化输出，着眼于服务全球需求，而不是他们帝国主人的狭隘需求。
The Order turned this system inside out. By enforcing global security, shattering the empires, opening the world to trade, and enabling the spread of the agricultural technologies of the Industrial Revolution, the Americans inadvertently introduced the world to “global” agriculture. No longer did a country need to conquer some distant bit of farmland in order to guarantee food security. Parts of the old imperial networks could now maximize output with an eye toward servicing global demand rather than the narrow needs of their imperial masters.
在全球化的世界中，不仅机会增加了；规模也是如此。更多的资本流向更多的地方，引发了农业的变革。
Not only did opportunities increase in a globalized world; so too did scale. More capital flowing to more places triggered transformations in agriculture.
更大的农场可以更加机械化，以越来越少的劳动力实现更高的效率和产出。这种优化赋予他们经济实力，要求更好的投入定价。大型农场不会从当地商店购买几十袋肥料和零散的锄头等，而是直接与石化公司和制造商签订合同来满足他们的需求。小城镇的基本原理被侵蚀了。
Larger farms could be more mechanized, achieving greater efficiencies and output with less and less labor. Such optimization granted them the economic heft to demand better pricing for inputs. Instead of getting a few dozen bags of fertilizer and the odd hoe and such from the local store, large farms would contract directly with petrochemical firms and manufacturers for their needs. The very rationale for small towns eroded.
全球化并不仅仅是空荡荡的农村；它还摧毁了世界上较小的社区，迫使每个人都进入大城市。与内布拉斯加州或新南威尔士州一样，在巴西塞拉多、俄罗斯黑土地区或中国水稻种植带等地更是如此。每一个变化都会导致同样的变化：种植更多的食物和分配更多的食物，但这样做的劳动力更少。
Globalization didn’t simply empty the countryside; it also gutted the world’s smaller communities, forcing everyone into the major cities. And as true as this was in Nebraska or New South Wales, it was wildly more true in places like the Brazilian Cerrado or Russia’s Black Earth region or China’s rice belt. Every change results in the same change: more food grown and more food distributed, but done so with less labor.
工业革命的初始阶段可能通过提供工业就业机会将人们从农场拉出来，而合成农业投入品的发展可能将他们推向城市，但秩序带来的全球竞争将农民赶出了他们的土地。即便如此，前提是当地正在崛起的农业巨头公司不会强迫小农，或者政府不会强行将小块土地合并为更大、更高效的工厂化农场。*
The initial phases of the Industrial Revolution may have pulled people off the farms by providing industrial employment, and the development of synthetic agricultural inputs may have pushed them into the cities, but the global competition provided by the Order hurled farmers off their lands. And even that assumes the rising local agricultural behemoth firms don’t muscle smallholders out, or that the government doesn’t forcibly consolidate small plots into larger, more efficient factory farms.*
所以它传播了。自有记载的历史以来一直缺乏地区安全或充足资本的领土可能会突然利用全球流动成为重要的生产国——甚至是出口国——这是第一次。食品既提高了质量又降低了成本。这给发达国家的传统生产商带来了压力，迫使他们要么通过技术来提高产量，要么放弃幽灵，转而专注于他们做得更好的事情。口味多样化。在大多数情况下，国家放弃了种植他们无法种植的粮食的尝试，大幅增加了他们可以种植的作物的产量长得好。美国人禁止其盟友之间发生军事冲突，消除了担心下一顿饭去哪儿的烦恼。全球农产品贸易呈爆炸式增长，国家和帝国的自给自足的需求消失了。
And so it spread. Territories that had lacked regional security or sufficient capital since the dawn of recorded history could suddenly tap global flows to become significant producers—and even exporters—for the first time. Foodstuffs both increased in quality and decreased in cost. That put pressure on legacy producers in the developed world, forcing them to either up their game with tech to increase yields, or give up the ghost and instead focus on things they did better. Tastes diversified. For the most part countries gave up attempting to grow foods they couldn’t grow well, drastically increasing their output for the crops they could grow well. The Americans’ prohibition of military conflict among their allies eliminated the heartburn of worrying where one might get their next meal. Global agricultural trade exploded, and the need for national and imperial autarky went out the window.
美国人对全球安全和经济架构的转变——或者更准确地说，美国人创建了世界上第一个真正的全球安全和经济架构——使欧洲在过去四分之一千年中所经历的工业化和城市化经历走向了全球。
Americans’ transformation of the global security and economic architecture—or more accurately, the Americans’ creation of the world’s first truly global security and economic architecture—enabled the industrialization and urbanization experiences that had defined Europe for the previous quarter millennia to go global.
第一波全球化浪潮冲击了秩序联盟的早期化身：西欧、战败的轴心国、韩国、台湾和新加坡的选区，以及其他盎格鲁殖民国家：澳大利亚、加拿大和新西兰。*与之前的英国人和德国人一样，所有这些国家的人民依次经历了大规模发展、大规模城市化、死亡率大量降低、寿命大量延长、人口大量膨胀和出生率大量降低。事实上，自 1965 年以来，发达国家几乎所有的人口增长——总体增长超过 50%——都来自于更长的寿命。正如德国人追随英国人的道路一样因此经历了整个人口转变的更快、更压缩版本，第一批二战后国家也是如此。
The first wave of globalization impacted the early incarnations of the Order alliance: Western Europe, the defeated Axis, the ward states of South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, and the other Anglo settler states: Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.* As with the British and Germans before them, the peoples of all these nations experienced mass development, mass urbanization, mass reductions in mortality, mass extensions of life spans, mass expansions in population, and mass reductions in birth rates, in that order. In fact, nearly all the population gains in the developed world since 1965—overall a greater than 50 percent increase—are from longer life spans. And just as the Germans had followed the British path and so experienced a faster, more compressed version of the entire demographic transition, so too did the first big batch of post–World War II states.
毕竟，这条路变得更容易走。水，而不是电，为第一批工厂提供动力；与古代城市一样，它们的建造地点也有很多限制，这同样限制了工人为它们配备人员的需要。同样，可互换零件和装配线的兴起早于电力。这种早期的工业努力可能已经超过了以前的制造规范的产量一个数量级，但它们仍然需要风、水或肌肉来为它们提供能量。这将它们的采用速度、范围和位置限制在非常特定的成功地区，从而延缓了城市化的影响。但到 1945 年，德国人已经证明电力是唯一的出路。突然之间，工厂可以放在任何地方. 历史加速了。英国人可能已经开辟了发展道路，但德国人为我们其他人铺平了道路。
After all, the path had gotten easier to follow. Water, not electricity, powered the first factories; there were as many limitations on where they could be built as there were on the cities of ancient times, which similarly limited the need for workers to staff them. Likewise, the rise of interchangeable parts and assembly lines predated electricity. Such early industrial efforts may have surpassed the output of previous manufacturing norms by an order of magnitude, but they still required either wind, water, or muscle to energize them. That limited the speed and scope and location of their adoption to very specific Geographies of Success, retarding the urbanization impact. But by 1945 the Germans had demonstrated that electricity was the only way to go. Suddenly a factory could be put anywhere. History sped up. The British may have blazed the path to development, but it was the Germans who paved it for the rest of us.
加拿大人、日本人、韩国人、意大利人和阿根廷人用两年半的时间改造了英国，而不是用了七代或德国的四代人，而后来的一批先进国家——西班牙、葡萄牙和希腊——一分为二。
Instead of the seven generations it took to transform Britain or the four for Germany, the Canadians, Japanese, Koreans, Italians, and Argentines did it in two and a half, while a group of advanced nation latecomers—Spain, Portugal, and Greece—did it in two.
故事也没有就此结束。
Nor did the story end there.
冷战结束后，美国人向前中立国家和前苏联世界开放了秩序成员身份。其结果是产生了 1950 年代和 60 年代的欧洲和日本繁荣的资本获取、资源获取和技术获取的相同攻击，但跨越了更广泛的世界范围和更大范围的人类。
After the Cold War’s end, the Americans threw open Order membership to the former neutrals as well as the former Soviet world. The result was the same assault of capital access, resource access, and technological access that generated the European and Japanese booms of the 1950s and 1960s, but across a much wider swath of the world and a much larger slice of humanity.
现在，绝大多数发展中国家都可以加入工业化、城市化和人口变化的乐趣，其中最大的新参与者是中国、印度、印度尼西亚、巴基斯坦、巴西、尼日利亚、孟加拉国、俄罗斯、墨西哥、菲律宾、越南、埃及、埃塞俄比亚和土耳其。正如工业工具包中的电能加速了这一过程，数字革命也是如此。信息不再锁在个人大脑中，而是在信息的河流中自由流动电子，只需单击一个按钮即可共享专业知识。原型制作从长达数年的过程加速到仅仅几周。已知的信息可以在几秒钟内传播开来，而研究合作可以跨越大陆和海洋。
Now the vast bulk of the developing world could join in the industrializing, urbanizing, demographics-changing fun, with the largest new players being China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Russia, Mexico, Philippines, Vietnam, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Turkey. Just as the addition of electricity to the industrial tool kit sped up the process, so did the Digital Revolution. With information no longer locked within individual brains but instead flowing freely on a river of electrons, expertise could be shared with the click of a button. Prototyping sped up from a years-long process to mere weeks. What was known could be disseminated within seconds, while research collaboration could cross continents and oceans alike.
正如德国人能够比英国人走得更快，就像日本人能够比德国人慢跑更快，就像西班牙人能够比日本人跑得更快一样，现在，发展中世界中更先进的国家——特别是中国、巴西和越南——可以比西班牙人更快地沿着同一条道路冲刺。
Just as the Germans were able to walk down the path faster than the British, and just as the Japanese were able to jog down the path faster than the Germans, and just as the Spanish were able to run down the path faster than the Japanese, now the more advanced nations of the developing world—specifically the Chinese, Brazilians, and Vietnamese—could sprint down that same road faster than the Spanish.
然而，尽管发生了所有计划外的疯狂变化，但不知何故，这一切不仅奏效了，而且效果很好。冷战后时刻真正壮观、甚至神奇的不仅仅是战争和饥荒在很大程度上从世界上消失了，而是所有这些国家的人口以不同的速度老龄化和扩张，创造了完美的基础实现飞速的、史无前例的经济增长。
And yet, despite all the wildly unplanned changes, somehow it all not simply worked, but worked beautifully. What was truly spectacular, even magical, about the post–Cold War moment wasn’t simply that war and famine had largely vanished from the world, but instead that all these countries’ populations, aging and expanding at different rates, created the perfect foundation for breakneck, historically unprecedented economic growth.
大约在 1980 年到 2015 年间，世界上所有的国际有线系统都属于两大类之一。
Between roughly 1980 and 2015, all the world’s internationally wired systems fell into one of two broad buckets.
在第一桶中的是那些人口结构转型相对较早的国家。死亡率迅速下降，寿命迅速延长，但出生率的下降尚未导致年轻工人数量的灾难性减少。这些国家非常贪婪，而且不仅仅是为了食物。一个人的大部分支出发生在 15 岁到 45 岁之间——这是人们购买汽车和房屋、抚养孩子和寻求高等教育的人生窗口期。这种以消费为主导的活动是推动经济向前发展的动力，而这一桶国家有消费余地。
In bucket #1 were those countries relatively early in their demographic transitions. Mortality was rapidly falling and life spans were rapidly expanding, but the drop in birth rates had not yet led to catastrophic reductions in the number of young workers. These countries were ravenous, and not just for food. Most of the spending a person does occurs between the ages of fifteen and forty-five—that’s the life window when people are buying cars and homes and raising children and seeking higher education. Such consumption-led activity is what drives an economy forward, and this bucket of countries had consumption to spare.
第二桶中的国家走得更远。死亡率仍在下降，寿命仍在延长，但速度已经放缓。毕竟，这些国家一般在几十年前就开始了工业化。但他们的出生率下降也开始得更早，他们的人口特征中少儿现象变得越来越明显。优先事项发生了变化。更少的孩子意味着更少的资源需求用于儿童抚养和教育，而更多的钱可以花在汽车和公寓上。老年人口积累了更多的资本，使更多的钱可以储蓄和投资。这些老龄化社会的活力并没有减弱，反而更加活跃，因为它们能够以更快的速度开发和实施技术。生产力飙升，而生产的产品变得更加复杂。这些国家缺少的是足够的年轻人来消费他们生产的产品。
The countries in bucket #2 were further along. Mortality was still falling, and life spans were still expanding, but the pace had slowed. After all, these countries had generally begun their industrialization a few decades earlier. But the drops in their birth rates had also begun earlier and the dearth of children in their demographic profiles was becoming obvious. Priorities changed. Fewer children meant fewer resources needed to be expended upon child rearing and education, while more could be splashed out on cars and condos. Older populations had accrued more capital, enabling more money to be saved and invested. These aging societies did not become less dynamic, but instead more so because they were able to develop and implement technologies at a more rapid pace. Productivity surged while the products produced became more sophisticated. What these countries lacked was enough young people to consume what they produced.
在这方面，美国人意外地提供了解决方案。该秩序的核心原则不仅是美国市场将向所有人开放，而且美国人对维护世界集体文明上限的安全承诺意味着这些老龄人口——这些出口导向型经济体——可以进入消费市场全世界。以消费为导向和以出口为导向的系统并不是简单地处于近似平衡状态。美国人关注世界的安全问题，使真正全球化的世界不仅出现了，而且繁荣了。
In this the Americans accidentally provided the solution. Not only was a central tenet of the Order that the American market would be open to all, but also the Americans’ security commitment to holding up the world’s collective civilizational ceiling meant that these older demographics—these export-led economies—could access consumer markets the world over. Consumption-led and export-led systems were not simply in approximate balance. The Americans seeing to the world’s security concerns enabled a truly globalized world to not only emerge, but thrive.
但没有什么是正常的。全球化始终取决于美国人对全球秩序的承诺，而自从 1989 年柏林墙倒塌以来，该秩序就不再符合美国人的战略利益。如果没有美国人对每个人都骑马，那么某些东西出现只是时间问题东亚或中东或俄罗斯外围（比如，我不知道，比方说，一场战争）打破了无法修复的全球体系。. . 假设美国人不自己做。
But there is nothing about it that was normal. Globalization was always dependent upon the Americans’ commitment to the global Order and that Order hasn’t served Americans’ strategic interests since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Without the Americans riding herd on everyone, it is only a matter of time before something in East Asia or the Middle East or the Russian periphery (like, I don’t know, say, a war) breaks the global system beyond repair . . . assuming that the Americans don’t do it themselves.
但即使美国人选择继续撑起世界集体文明的天花板，全球化的鼎盛时期也没有什么是可持续的。1980-2015 年的太平日子已经结束。从 1960 年代开始在发达国家和 1990 年代在发展中国家开始的出生率下降现在已经持续了几十年。
But even if the Americans choose to continue holding up the world’s collective civilizational ceiling, there was nothing about the heyday of globalization that is sustainable. The halcyon days of 1980–2015 are over. The collapse in birth rates that began across the developed world in the 1960s and across the developing world in the 1990s now has decades of steam behind it.
美中不足的是，加速工业化所证明的事实同样适用于加速人口统计。1700 年，英国妇女平均生育 4.6 个孩子。这几乎与 1800 年德国女性的平均水平、1900 年意大利女性的平均水平、1960 年韩国女性的平均水平或70年代初的中国女人。现在，在所有这些国家中，新的平均值都低于 1.8，而且在许多情况下远低于此。*到 2030 年，普通的孟加拉国女性可能会处于这种境地。
The pipe bomb in the ointment is that what proved true for accelerated industrialization proved equally true for accelerated demographics. In 1700 the average British woman bore 4.6 children. That’s almost identical to that of the average German woman in 1800 or the average Italian woman in 1900 or the average Korean woman in 1960 or the average Chinese woman in the early 1970s. Now, in all these countries, the new average is below 1.8 and in many cases well below.* This is a position the average Bangladeshi woman will likely find herself in by 2030.
现在到了山的另一边。
Now comes the other side of the hill.
伴随工业化而来的每一个增长故事的核心因素是，大部分经济增长来自不断膨胀的人口。大多数人忽略了工业化和城市化进程中的另一个步骤：较低的死亡率使人口增加到这样的程度，以至于它压倒了出生率下降的任何影响。. . 但只有几十年。最终，长寿的收益会达到最大值，使一个国家的人口更多，但孩子却很少。昨天的几个孩子导致今天的几个年轻工人导致明天的几个成熟工人。而现在，终于，明天到来了。
A central factor in every growth story that accompanies industrialization is that much of the economic growth comes from a swelling population. What most people miss is that there’s another step in the industrializationcum-urbanization process: lower mortality increases the population to such a degree that it overwhelms any impact from a decline in birth rates . . . but only for a few decades. Eventually gains in longevity max out, leaving a country a greater population, but with few children. Yesterday’s few children leads to today’s few young workers leads to tomorrow’s few mature workers. And now, at long last, tomorrow has arrived.
在 2020 年代，出生率不再简单地下降；这么长时间以来，他们一直很低，以至于即使是年龄结构较年轻的国家现在也很少有年轻人——生育孩子的人口。随着本已较小的二十多岁、三十多岁的干部进入三四十岁，出生率不会简单地继续长期下降，而是会崩溃。一旦一个国家的老年人多于儿童，下一个可怕的步骤就完全不可避免：人口崩溃。而且因为任何开始这一过程的国家都是已经没有年轻人的国家，这些国家将永远无法恢复。*
In the 2020s, birth rates are no longer simply dropping; they have been so low for so long that even the countries with the younger age structures are now running low of young adults—the demographic that produces the children. As the already smaller twenty-something and thirty-something cadres age into their thirties and forties, birth rates will not simply continue their long decline, they will collapse. And once a country has more older folks than children, the next, horrible step is utterly unavoidable: a population crash. And because any country that begins this process is one that has already run out of young adults, these countries will never recover.*
更糟糕的是，自从英国人开始让我们所有人走上这条道路以来，就像从农村到城市的整个转变进行得越来越快一样，从大量儿童到大量退休人员的人口结构转变也是如此。前端的转型和增长越快，后端的人口崩溃就越快。
Even worse, just as the entire transformation from rural to urban has proceeded ever-faster since the British started us all down this road, so too does the demographic transformation from lots of children to lots of retirees. The faster the transformation and growth on the front end, the faster the population collapse on the back end.
迄今为止，这种压缩现象在工作中造成的后果最不幸的海啸是中国。在理查德·米尔豪斯·尼克松 (Richard Milhous Nixon) 1972 年拜访毛泽东之前，漫长的中国历史一直处于相对前工业化时代，这次访问证明了将红色中国推向苏联的成功努力。中国重新结盟的代价非常直截了当：加入美国主导的全球秩序。大约 8 亿中国人开始走上工业化道路，这条道路现在已不再是一条新开辟的道路，而更像是一条带有双 HOV 车道的十四车道高速公路。按照其他大部分人建立的模式，中国人的死亡率骤降了四分之三，而中国人的数量也随之增加。和以前的所有人一样，中国的人口从 1970 年的不到 8 亿猛增到 1 多万。*
By far the most unfortunate tsunami of consequence of this compression phenomenon at work is China. The long stretch of Chinese history was comparatively preindustrial until one Richard Milhous Nixon’s 1972 visit to one Mao Zedong, in what would prove a successful effort to turn Red China against the Soviet Union. The price for Chinese realignment was pretty straightforward: admittance into the American-led global Order. Some 800 million Chinese started down the route to industrialization, a route that was now less a newly blazed path, and more a fourteen-lane superhighway with double HOV lanes. Following the patterns established by much of the rest of humanity, Chinese mortality plummeted by three-quarters and the Chinese population expanded to match. China, like everyone before, saw its population surge from under 800 million in 1970 to over 1.4 billion in 2021.*
世界上许多人认为的威胁——中国在经济、军事和人口方面的迅速崛起——只不过是将 200 年的经济和人口转型挤进了灼热的 40 年，彻底改变了中国社会和全球格局的贸易。. .
What many in the world see as a threat—the rapid rise of China in economic, military, and demographic terms—is nothing more than two hundred years of economic and demographic transformation squeezed into a searing four decades, utterly transforming Chinese society and global patterns of trade . . .
. . . 以及中国的人口结构。不管你怎么咬数字显示，2022年的中国是人类历史上老龄化速度最快的社会。在中国，自从 19 世纪90 年代中国的出生率降至更替水平以下以来，人口增长的故事已经结束。完全更替生育率为每位妇女生育 2.1 个孩子。截至 2022 年初，中国仅部分发布的 2011-2020 年人口普查表明，中国的死亡率最高为 1.3，是人类历史上最低的。该国的人口收缩现在与其扩张一样迅速发生，完全的人口崩溃肯定会在一代人之内发生。中国是太棒了，只是不是出于大多数人的原因。在一个人的一生中，该国很快就会从工业化前的财富和健康水平转变为工业化后的人口崩溃。有几年的空闲时间。
. . . as well as the Chinese demography. No matter how you crunch the numbers, China in 2022 is the fastest-aging society in human history. In China the population growth story is over and has been over since China’s birth rate slipped below replacement levels in the 1990s. A full replacement birth rate is 2.1 children per woman. As of early-2022, China’s only partly released 2011–2020 census indicates China’s rate is at most 1.3, among the lowest of any people throughout human history. The country’s demographic contraction is now occurring just as quickly as its expansion, with complete demographic collapse certain to occur within a single generation. China is amazing, just not for the reasons most opine. The country will soon have traveled from preindustrial levels of wealth and health to postindustrial demographic collapse in a single human lifetime. With a few years to spare.
中国也不会孤军奋战。工业化进程的时间交错性——从英国到德国再到俄罗斯和西北欧、日本、韩国、加拿大和西班牙——加上该进程的稳步加速，意味着世界上大部分人口面临大规模退休，随后是人口几乎同时崩溃。世界人口结构在二十到四十年前就已经到了不可逆转的地步。2020 年代是一切分崩离析的十年。
Nor will China die alone. The time-staggered nature of the industrialization process—from Britain to Germany to Russia and northwestern Europe and Japan to Korea to Canada and Spain—combined with the steadily accelerating nature of that process, means that much of the world’s population faces mass retirements followed by population crashes at roughly the same time. The world’s demographic structure passed the point of no return twenty to forty years ago. The 2020s are the decade when it all breaks apart.
对于中国、俄罗斯、日本、德国、意大利、韩国、乌克兰、加拿大、马来西亚、台湾、罗马尼亚、荷兰、比利时和奥地利等不同的国家，问题不在于这些国家何时会进入人口老化阶段。所有人都将看到他们的工人干部在 2020 年代大规模退休。没有一个国家拥有足够的年轻人口，甚至可以假装重振人口。所有人都受到终端人口统计的影响。真正的问题是他们的社会如何以及多久会分裂？他们是在沉默中泄气还是猛烈抨击光的消亡？
For countries as varied as China, Russia, Japan, Germany, Italy, South Korea, Ukraine, Canada, Malaysia, Taiwan, Romania, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Austria, the question isn’t when these countries will age into demographic obsolescence. All will see their worker cadres pass into mass retirement in the 2020s. None have sufficient young people to even pretend to regenerate their populations. All suffer from terminal demographics. The real questions are how and how soon do their societies crack apart? And do they deflate in silence or lash out against the dying of the light?
紧随其后的是另一个出生率下降得更快的国家，因此他们将在 2030 年代和 2040 年代面临类似的人口解体：巴西、西班牙、泰国、波兰、澳大利亚、古巴、希腊、葡萄牙、匈牙利和瑞士。
Coming up behind them—rapidly—is another cadre of countries whose birth rates have dropped even faster, and so who will face a similar demographic disintegration in the 2030s and 2040s: Brazil, Spain, Thailand, Poland, Australia, Cuba, Greece, Portugal, Hungary, and Switzerland.
更进一步，在 2050 年代，一些国家开始了他们的出生率下降的时间稍晚，所以如果今天的二十多岁和三十多岁的人能生一大堆孩子，谁还有机会避免人口幻灭，但老实说，这些迟到的出生率下降已经严重到看起来不太好：孟加拉国、印度、印度尼西亚、墨西哥、越南、伊朗、土耳其、摩洛哥、乌兹别克斯坦、沙特阿拉伯、智利、捷克共和国。
Even further forward, in the 2050s, are countries who started their birth rate collapse a bit later, and so who still may have a chance to avoid demographic disillusion if they can get today’s twenty- and thirty-somethings to have a whole mess of kids, but honestly, these late arrivals’ birth rate collapses have been so severe it doesn’t look great: Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Vietnam, Iran, Turkey, Morocco, Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, Chile, the Czech Republic.
下一批国家——主要在拉丁美洲或撒哈拉以南非洲或中东较贫穷的地区——更令人担忧。他们的人口结构更年轻——年轻得多——但这并不意味着他们处于更好的位置，因为经济和人口健康不仅仅是数字和年龄。
The next batch of countries—mostly in the poorer parts of Latin America or sub-Saharan Africa or the Middle East—are even more concerning. Their demographic structures are younger—far younger—but that doesn’t mean they are in a better position, because there is more to economic and demographic health than just numbers and ages.
在大多数情况下，这些国家属于采掘型经济体，它们将这种或那种原材料商品运出，利用所得收益为其人民提供进口食品和/或消费品。在许多方面，他们已经成功地进入了工业化进程的部分——最显着的是较低的死亡率、更可靠的食品供应、城市化进程的加快和人口激增——但没有经历使进步持续下去的那些部分：教育水平的提高、现代化的国家、增值经济体系、社会进步、产业发展或技术成果。
In most cases these countries are extractive economies that ship out this or that raw commodity, using the proceeds to supply their population with imported food and/or consumer goods. In many ways they’ve managed to access portions of the industrialization process—most notably lower mortality, more reliable food supplies, increased urbanization, and population booms—without experiencing the bits that make advancement stick: increased educational levels, a modernized state, a value-added economic system, social progress, industrial development, or technological achievement.
在一个安全的全球化世界中，只要商品流出而资金流入，这种混合模式就可以蹒跚前行。但在一个贸易受到严格限制的不安全、支离破碎的世界中，彻底的国家崩溃将远不是最大的问题这些人的脸。在这些国家，人口本身很容易受到国外变化的影响。降低死亡率和提高生活水平的工业技术不可能没有被发明出来，但如果贸易崩溃，这些技术可能会被剥夺. 如果有任何影响这些国家的商品流出或收入或产品流入，整个地方将崩溃，同时经历圣经规模的根深蒂固的饥荒。经济发展、生活质量、寿命、健康和人口扩张都受制于全球化的突发奇想。或者更确切地说，在这种情况下，去全球化。
In a safe, globalized world such a hybridization model can limp along so long as the commodities flow out and the money flows in. But in an unsafe, fractured world where trade is sharply circumscribed, outright national collapse will by far not be the biggest problem these peoples face. In these countries the very population is vulnerable to changes farther abroad. The industrial technologies that reduce mortality and raise standards of living cannot be uninvented, but if trade collapses, these technologies can be denied. Should anything impact these countries’ commodity outflows or the income or product inflows, the entire place will break down while experiencing deep-rooted famine on a biblical scale. Economic development, quality of life, longevity, health, and demographic expansion are all subject to the whims of globalization. Or rather, in this case, deglobalization.
学习一个可怕的词
Learning a Scary Word
让我们把它变得不那么理论化：
Let’s make this a bit less theoretical:
我住在科罗拉多多山的乡村，海拔 7,500 英尺。下雪与其说是一种季节性现象，不如说是一种生活方式。当我第一次搬到这里时，我心想，“自我？新的开始？新家？新的“你”？让我们把尸体带走吧！” 我几乎每天都开始徒步旅行，下雪时我就兴致勃勃地出发了！还有一把铲子。
I live at 7,500 feet above sea level in rural, mountainous Colorado. Snow is less a seasonal occurrence and more a way of life. When I first moved here I thought to myself, “Self? New start? New home? New ‘you’? Let’s get the body to go with it!” I started hiking nearly every day, and when the snow came I attacked with gusto! And a shovel.
只有一把铲子。
Only a shovel.
它是 。. . 我做过的最愚蠢的事情。
It was . . . the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.
一个月后，我准备好了一台 Toro 汽油动力吹雪机。几乎让我陷入困境的二十多个小时的磨难现在变成了不到两个小时的不便。
A month later I was ready with a Toro gasoline-powered snowblower. What had been a twenty-plus-hour ordeal that nearly put me in traction was now a slightly less than two-hour inconvenience.
那二十多小时只是我的车道和人行道。只是我的家。从我的车道到我的山脚有两英里的蹄子，还有一个七英里半的峡谷穿行路到丹佛市所在的高地平原。这是很多铲子。如果没有以汽油为动力的除雪设备，我在 7,500 英尺的房子不仅永远不会建成，甚至在理论上也无法维护。*
That twenty-something hours was just for my drive- and walkways. Just my home. It’s a two-mile hoof from my driveway to the base of my mountain, and another seven-and-a-half-mile canyon-threading ruck down to the highland plains which host the city of Denver. That’s a lot of shoveling. Without gasoline-powered snow clearing gear, my house at 7,500 feet not only would have never been built, it could not even theoretically be maintained.*
现在我们在丹佛，它坐落在曾经非常恰当地称为美国大沙漠的地方。当一个人从中西部潮湿的低地向西移动时，土地稳步上升和干燥。丹佛坐落在落基山脉前缘的东侧，永久而牢牢地处于雨影之中，每年的降水量不到七英寸半。更高的海拔意味着无论下什么雨都会很快蒸发。在“一英里高”的丹佛，湿度非常低，小雪不会融化，而是直接升华成水蒸气。科罗拉多州大约四分之三的人口生活在大陆分水岭以东的类似条件下，但科罗拉多州降水的大约四分之三落在分水岭以西。
And now we are in Denver, which sits in what used to be very appropriately known as the Great American Desert. As one moves west from the humid lowlands of the Midwest, the land steadily rises and dries. Denver sits at on the eastern flank of the Rockies’ Front Range, permanently and firmly in rain shadow, getting less than seven and a half inches of precipitation annually. Higher altitudes mean that whatever rain does fall tends to evaporate quickly. In “mile-high” Denver, the humidity is so low, light snows don’t so much melt as sublimate directly into vapor. Roughly three-quarters of Colorado’s population lives in similar conditions east of the continental divide, but roughly three-quarters of the precipitation that falls in Colorado lands to the divide’s west.
丹佛——科罗拉多——以两种方式解决这个问题。首先是到处建水坝。查看任何地铁的任何地图，如丹佛，位于 Front Range 的东部边缘。你会注意到湖泊。很多很多的湖泊。但它们不是湖泊。它们是旨在尽可能多地捕获春季融雪的愤怒的水库。科罗拉多城市已经改变了它的直接地形，以便尽可能长时间地储存每一滴水。
Denver—Colorado—addresses this problem in two ways. The first is to put dams everywhere. Look at any map of any metro that, like Denver, lies on eastern edge of the Front Range. You’ll notice lakes. Lots and lots of lakes. But they are not lakes. They are reservoirs designed to capture as much of the spring snowmelt rage as possible. Urban Colorado has modified its immediate terrain in order to store every drop of water it can for as long as it can.
这还远远不够。第二项行动是在落基山脉钻探隧道，以便将该州的西部流域与东部人口连接起来。目前有两打这样的跨流域导流怪物。总的来说，每年储存每一滴水并重新安置约 250亿加仑的水，使柯林斯堡、埃斯蒂斯帕克、格里利、博尔德、科罗拉多斯普林斯、普韦布洛和大丹佛得以存在。更不用说几乎整个州的农业部门了。
It isn’t nearly enough. The second action is to drill tunnels through the Rockies in order to connect the state’s western watersheds to its eastern populations. At present there are two dozen of these transbasin diversion monsters. Collectively, storing every drop and relocating some 25 billion gallons annually enables Fort Collins, Estes Park, Greeley, Boulder, Colorado Springs, Pueblo, and Greater Denver to exist. Not to mention the near entirety of the state’s agricultural sector.
除去构建和维护该水资源管理系统所需的技术，Front Range 城市的最大可持续人口将从今天的大约 450 万骤降至大约十分之一。
Remove the technologies required to construct and maintain this water management system, and the maximum sustainable population of the Front Range cities would plummet from the roughly four and a half million it is today to something roughly one-tenth that.
这个故事的某些版本存在于世界上大多数人口稠密的地方。也许这是一个基础设施问题。也许是气候吧。也许是关于资源或食物或安全。但底线始终如一：无论出于何种原因，如果全球产品和服务以及能源和食品的流动中断，人口、政治和经济版图就会发生变化。
Some version of this story exists for most of the world’s populated places. Maybe it is an infrastructure issue. Maybe it’s climatic. Maybe it’s about resources or food or security. But the bottom line is always the same: If for whatever reason global flows of products and services and energy and foodstuffs are interrupted, the population and political and economic maps will change.
在后全球化的世界里，像美国这样资源丰富的大国可以在内部洗牌产品以制造一切工作。我生活在零恐惧中，我将无法为我的吹雪机（在明尼苏达州制造）采购汽油（在科罗拉多州从科罗拉多州生产的原油中提炼）以保持通往我家的车道（沥青来自俄克拉荷马州）（来自蒙大拿州的木框架），我经常远程办公（使用由俄亥俄州的钢铁、肯塔基州的铝和德克萨斯州的塑料组成的通信网络）。
In a post-globalized world, large, diversely resource-rich countries like the United States can shuffle products around internally to make everything work. I live in zero fear that I won’t be able to source gasoline (refined in Colorado from crude oil produced in Colorado) for my snowblower (manufactured in Minnesota) to keep clear the driveway (the asphalt is from Oklahoma) to my house (wood framing from Montana) that I often telecommute from (using a comms network composed of steel from Ohio, aluminum from Kentucky, and plastics from Texas).
很少有地方具有这种多样性、影响力、访问性和冗余性。大多数人都依赖——通常是完全依赖——全球化来做他们当地相当于清除积雪这样“简单”的事情。这就引出了一个问题，如果没有石油，上海会是什么样子？还是没有钢铁的柏林？利雅得没有。. . 食物？去全球化不仅仅意味着一个更黑暗、更贫穷的世界，它还意味着更糟糕的事情。
Precious few places have this sort of diversity, reach, access, and redundancy. Most are dependent—often wholly—on globalization to do their locality’s equivalent of something as “simple” as clearing the snow. It begs the question of what Shanghai would look like without oil? Or Berlin without steel? Riyadh without . . . food? Deglobalization doesn’t simply mean a darker, poorer world, it means something far worse.
一个解开。
An unraveling.
世界目前有两个令人不安和令人不安的合理例子来说明这种解体可能是什么样子：津巴布韦和委内瑞拉。在这两个案例中，管理不善都破坏了两国生产出口商品的能力——津巴布韦是食品，委内瑞拉是石油和石油产品——导致资金短缺如此严重，这两个国家的能力进口基本崩溃。在津巴布韦，最终的结果是十多年的经济负增长，其结果远比大萧条时期更糟糕，大部分人口沦为自给农业。委内瑞拉不是这样。. . 幸运。它以前进口了三分之二以上的食品它的经济崩溃。委内瑞拉石油产量大幅下降，该国甚至缺乏足够的燃料来播种农作物，导致西半球历史上最严重的饥荒。
The world currently has two reasonably disturbing and disturbingly reasonable examples as to what this unraveling might look like: Zimbabwe and Venezuela. In both cases mismanagement par excellence destroyed the ability of both countries to produce their for-export goods—foodstuffs in the case of Zimbabwe, oil and oil products in the case of Venezuela—resulting in funds shortages so extreme, the ability of the countries to import largely collapsed. In Zimbabwe, the end result was more than a decade of negative economic growth, generating outcomes far worse than those of the Great Depression, with the bulk of the population reduced to subsistence farming. Venezuela wasn’t so . . . fortunate. It imported more than two-thirds of its foodstuffs before its economic collapse. Venezuelan oil production dropped so much, the country even lacks sufficient fuel to sow crops, contributing to the worst famine in the history of the Western Hemisphere.
我不会轻易使用这些示例。您正在寻找描述此结果的词不是“去全球化”，甚至不是“去工业化”，而是“去文明化”。
I don’t use these examples lightly. The word you are looking for to describe this outcome isn’t “deglobalize” or even “deindustrialize,” but instead “decivilize.”
我们所知道的关于人类文明的一切都是基于组织的简单概念。一旦政府制定了一些基本的规则，比如“不要杀死你的邻居”，人们就会开始做人们所做的事情：养家糊口，种粮食，敲打小工具。人们开始交易，这样农民就不用再做面粉了，铁匠也不必自己种粮食了。这种专业化使我们在我们选择的领域更有生产力——无论是农业、铣削还是锻造。这个社会变得更加富裕和扩大。更多的土地、更多的人、更多的专业化、更多的互动、更多的内部贸易、更大的规模经济。
Everything we know about human civilization is based on the simple idea of organization. Once a government lays down some basic ground rules like “don’t kill your neighbor,” people start doing what people do: raising families, growing food, hammering out widgets. People start trading, so that the farmer doesn’t also have to make flour and the blacksmith doesn’t have to grow his own food. This specialization makes us more productive in our chosen fields—be it farming or milling or blacksmithing. This society gets richer and expands. More land, more people, more specialization, more interaction, more internal trade, greater economies of scale.
这种模式从文明诞生之初就一点一点地发展起来，但往往不止是挫折，甚至是崩溃。帝国起起落落，当它们衰落时，它们的大部分进步也随之消失。美国领导的秩序（大O）所做的不仅仅是改变游戏规则；它制度化秩序（小o)，进而让工业化、城市化无处不在。这将全球人口从众多儿童转变为众多年轻和成熟的工人，产生了人类前所未见的持续消费和投资热潮。安全得到保障，资金、能源和粮食供应充足，六千年的风风雨雨被一列不可阻挡的前进货运列车所取代。
This pattern developed bit by bit since the dawn of civilization, but there were often not merely setbacks but collapses. Empires rose and fell, and when they fell, much of their progress fell with them. The American-led Order (big O) did more than change the rules of the game; it institutionalized order (little o), which in turn allowed industrialization and urbanization to spread everywhere. That shifted the global demographic from one of lots of children to lots of young and mature workers, generating a sustained consumption and investment boom the likes of which humanity had no previous experience with. With security guaranteed and supplies of capital and energy and foodstuffs ample, six thousand years of ups and downs were replaced by an unstoppable freight train of progress.
在秩序和这个神奇的人口时刻，我们变得如此专业化，我们的技术也如此进步，以至于我们在过去必不可少的任务上变得完全无能为力。尝试在保持全职工作的同时自己生产电力或足够的食物来维持生计。使这一切成为可能的是连续性的理念：我们今天享有的安全和保障明天仍然存在，我们可以将自己的生命交到这些系统的手中。毕竟，如果您非常确定政府明天会倒台，您可能就不会担心经理坚持认为非常重要的任何与工作相关的颜色编码细节，而是将时间集中在学习如何制作蔬菜罐头上。
Under the Order and this magical demographic moment, we have become so specialized and our technology has advanced so much that we have become totally incompetent at tasks that used to be essential. Try producing your own electricity or enough food to live on while keeping up your full-time job. What makes it all possible is the idea of continuity: the idea that the safety and security we enjoy today will still be here tomorrow and we can put our lives in the hands of these systems. After all, if you were pretty sure the government was going to collapse tomorrow, you’d probably worry less about whatever work-related color-coded minutiae your manager insists is so important and instead focus your time on learning how to can vegetables.
劳动力高度专业化现在已成为常态，贸易变得如此复杂，以至于整个经济分部门（信贷员、铝挤压机、仓库规划咨询公司、砂磨机）现在都在为它提供便利。这种专业化也不限于个人。随着全球和平，国家能够专业化。台湾半导体。大豆中的巴西。石油中的科威特。德国机械。文明进程一直在达到其最终的、最佳的高峰。
Labor hyperspecialization is now the norm, and trade has become so complex that entire economic subsectors (loan officers, aluminum extruders, warehouse planning consultancies, sand polishers) now exist to facilitate it. Nor is this specialization limited to individuals. With global peace, countries are able to specialize. Taiwan in semiconductors. Brazil in soy. Kuwait in oil. Germany in machinery. The civilizational process has been reaching for its ultimate, optimal peak.
但“最佳”与“自然”不同。这一刻的一切——从美国对安全架构的重新布线到历史上前所未有的人口结构——都是人为的。它正在失败。
But “optimal” is not the same thing as “natural.” Everything about this moment—from the American rewiring of the security architecture to the historically unprecedented demographic structure—is artificial. And it is failing.
面对人口遗忘和全球化崩溃的深渊，各国有多种途径，但它们都有一些共同点：互动减少意味着获取机会减少意味着收入减少意味着规模经济减少意味着劳动力专业化程度降低意味着互动减少。短缺迫使人们——迫使国家——照顾自己的需要。连续性和劳动力专业化的增值优势逐渐消失。每个人都变得效率低下。生产力较低。这意味着一切都变少了：不仅是电子产品，还有电力，不仅是汽车，还有汽油，不仅是化肥，还有食品。部分小于总和。它复合。电力短缺肠道制造。粮食短缺使人口崩溃。更少的人意味着更少的机会让任何需要专门劳动的东西继续工作。比如说，道路建设、电网或食品生产。
There are a number of ways down for countries looking down the maw of demographic oblivion and globalization’s collapse, but they all share something in common: reduced interaction means reduced access means reduced income means fewer economies of scale means less labor specialization means reduced interaction. Shortage forces people—forces countries—to look after their own needs. The value-added advantages of continuity and labor specialization wither. Everyone becomes less efficient. Less productive. And that means less of everything: not just electronics but electricity, not just automobiles but gasoline, not just fertilizer but food. The parts are less than the sum. And it compounds. Electricity shortages gut manufacturing. Food shortages gut the population. Fewer people means less chance of keeping anything that requires specialized labor working. Say, things like road construction or the electrical grid or food production.
这就是“去文明化”的含义：一连串的强化崩溃不仅破坏，而且摧毁了现代世界运转的基石。并非每个地方的地理位置都适合在教团之前实现文明。并非每个地方都能在 Order 结束后维持文明。
That is what “decivilization” means: a cascade of reinforcing breakdowns that do not simply damage, but destroy, the bedrock of what makes the modern world function. Not every location had the right geography to make a go of civilization before the Order. Not every location will be able to maintain civilization after Order’s end.
对于像墨西哥这样与美国有联系的国家来说，在没有从亚洲进口零部件的情况下艰难地进行工业扩建是一回事。对于像韩国这样的国家来说，当它失去进口石油和铁矿石以及食品和出口市场的机会时，蒙混过关是另一回事。
It is one thing for a country like Mexico, which is wired into the United States, to struggle through an industrial buildout and get by without parts imported from Asia. It is quite another for a country like Korea to muddle through when it loses access to imported oil and iron ore and foodstuffs and export markets.
最糟糕的是，许多欠发达国家完全依赖其他地方的文明凝聚。津巴布韦和委内瑞拉是选择走向某种非文明化道路的国家的例子。为了大多数情况下，由于在一个大陆或更远的地方发生的事件，他们无法希望影响更少的控制，它将被强加给他们。即使是巴西、德国或中国等地的温和斗争也会扰乱对玻利维亚、哈萨克斯坦或刚果民主共和国材料的需求，以至于较弱的国家将失去进口基本现代化产品所需的收入。世界上的巴西人、德国人和中国人面临的不仅仅是温和的斗争。
Worst of all, many less advanced countries are wholly dependent upon civilization holding together in other places. Zimbabwe and Venezuela are examples of countries that chose the path to a sort of decivilization. For most, it will be foisted upon them due to events a continent or more away in places they cannot hope to influence much less control. Even moderate struggles in places like Brazil or Germany or China will so disrupt demand for materials from Bolivia or Kazakhstan or the Democratic Republic of the Congo that the weaker states will lose the income required to enable import for the products that allow for basic modernity. And the world’s Brazils and Germanys and Chinas face far more than mere moderate struggles.
在这种不断加深的阴霾中有一些亮点，但只是少数。
There are a few bright spots in this deepening gloom, but only a few.
极少数国家实现了高度发展，同时避免了出生率的急剧下降。这是 。. . 一个痛苦的候选名单：美国、法国、阿根廷、瑞典和新西兰。和 。. . 就是这样。即使政治一致，即使每个人的心都在正确的地方，即使所有的美国人、法国人、阿根廷人、瑞典人和新西兰人都想把世界其他地方的需求放在他们自己的需求之前，人类人口结构的巨大变化意味着所有这些加在一起将不足以构成支持新全球体系的基础。
A precious few countries have managed a high degree of development while simultaneously avoiding a collapse in birth rates. It is . . . a painfully short list: the United States, France, Argentina, Sweden, and New Zealand. And . . . that’s it. Even if politics aligned, even if everyone’s hearts were in the right place, even if all the Americans and French and Argentines and Swedes and Kiwis wanted to put the rest of the world’s needs in front of their own, the sheer scale of humanity’s demographic turning means all of them combined would not comprise nearly enough of a foundation to support a new global system.
从大多数方面来看——尤其是在教育、财富和健康方面——全球化一直很伟大，但它永远不会持久。你和你的父母（在某些情况下，还有祖父母）所认为的正常、良好和正确的生活方式——也就是说，过去七十年左右——在战略和人口方面都是人类状况的历史异常. 尤其是 1980 年至 2015 年期间，简直就是一个独特、孤立、幸运的时刻。一个已经结束的时刻。我们有生之年肯定不会再来的时刻。
By most measures—most notably in education, wealth, and health—globalization has been great, but it was never going to last. What you and your parents (and in some cases, grandparents) assumed as the normal, good, and right way of living—that is, the past seven decades or so—is a historic anomaly for the human condition both in strategic and demographic terms. The period of 1980–2015 in particular has simply been a unique, isolated, blessed moment in time. A moment that has ended. A moment that will certainly not come again in our lifetimes.
这甚至不是坏消息。
And that isn’t even the bad news.
更多的结束
The End of More
在深水航行之前的糟糕日子里，人类经验的高度根本不是很高。大多数治理体系是帝国和封建的混合体。
In the bad ol’ days before deepwater navigation, the height of the human experience wasn’t very high at all. Most governing systems were a mix of imperial and feudal.
这个问题是触手可及的。
The issue was one of reach.
少数地理条件丰富的地方将自己确立为帝国中心，并利用其财富在军事和经济上进行扩张，以控制其他领土。有时，这些中心会创新或采用能够改变区域力量平衡的技术，从而实现更成功的土地掠夺。罗马人利用道路更快地在这里和那里派兵。蒙古人发明了铁马镫，这使得他们的骑马战士能够用几乎每个人擦地板。
The few places with rich geographies would establish themselves as Imperial Centers and use their wealth to reach out militarily and economically to control other territorial swaths. Sometimes these Centers would innovate or adapt a technology that would alter the regional balance of power, enabling more successful land grabs. The Romans used roads to dispatch troops here and there more quickly. The Mongols developed the iron stirrup, which enabled their mounted warriors to wipe the floor with, well, pretty much everyone.
但是这些技术没有什么不能传播到竞争中，消除这个或那个力量的一时优势。当然，因为很少有人愿意成为别人的附属品，所以每个人都会尝试开发或改造竞争对手的技术。汉尼拔以驯服一些动物——大象——而闻名，这使他能够以意想不到的方式攻击罗马的核心领土。波兰人竖起了一排抗马城堡，使他们能够在蒙古入侵者的大致方向上挥动自己的私处。
But there was nothing about these techs that couldn’t disseminate out to the competition, eliminating this or that power’s momentary advantage. And of course, as few wanted to be another’s occupied subjects, everyone would attempt to develop or adapt rival techs. Hannibal famously tamed a few critters—elephants—which enabled him to attack Rome’s core territories in ways unexpected. The Poles erected a raft of horse-resistant castles, allowing them to wave their private parts in the general direction of Mongol raiders.
这是大局，但不是很准确。或者至少，不是很完整。从组织上讲，帝国扩张几乎不是常态。当然，我们知道这些技术和反技术斗争是历史。但是，对于每一次成功的帝国扩张，都会有帝国的崩溃以及一万个领土从未在阳光下勉强维持过片刻。
That’s the big picture, but it isn’t very accurate. Or at least, not very complete. Organizationally speaking, the imperial expansions were hardly the norm. Sure, we know these technological and countertechnological struggles as, well, history. But for every successful imperial expansion there was an imperial collapse as well as ten thousand territories that never managed to eke out a moment in the sun.
较小的图片确实很小。
The smaller picture was very small indeed.
在地方一级，生活几乎没有那么戏剧化。大多数人是农奴，一个奇特的术语，指的是艰苦的、近乎自给自足的农业。农奴之所以有安全感，完全是因为他们与当地领主的关系。这些领主控制着一座坚固的城镇或要塞，当袭击者或小规模军队来袭时，农奴会惊慌失措地冲进防御工事，并蹲下直到威胁过去。为了“换取”这种保障，封建领主向农奴征收赋税、粮食和劳力。*由于最常见的纳税方式是用一些剩余的食物，各个领主之间没有太多的商品差异来进行交易。它不是一个鼓励广泛互动或教育、进步或发展的系统。变化不大。曾经。
At the local level, life wasn’t nearly so dramatic. Most people were serfs, a fancy term for grueling, near-subsistence farming. What security the serfs had was wholly due to their relationship to their local lords. These lords controlled a fortified town or keep, and when raiders or small armies came a-lootin’, the serfs would rush in panic into the fortification, and hunker down until the threat passed. In “exchange” for this security, the feudal lords collected taxes and food and labor from the serfs.* Since the most common way to pay taxes was with some surplus food, the various lords didn’t have much goods differentiation to trade among themselves. It wasn’t a system that encouraged broad-scale interaction or education or advancement or development. Not a lot changed. Ever.
这两个系统的经济性相似得令人沮丧。封建主义只是一种证券交易：领主保护农奴，而农奴则向领主保证生命。完成。帝国制度并没有太大的不同：任何大规模的“贸易”都必须存在于帝国的边界内。确保获得新商品的唯一方法是冒险和征服。由于任何优势都是暂时的，这一切都归结为帝国中心对其省份的安全换忠诚交易，这是由帝国军队保证的。
The economics of these two systems were depressingly similar. Feudalism was simply a trade of securities: the lords provide protection to the serfs, while the serfs pledge their lives to their lords. Finis. Imperial systems weren’t much different: any large-scale “trade” had to exist within the borders of the empire. The only way to secure access to new goods was to venture out and conquer. And since any advantage would be temporary, it all came down to the security-for-loyalty trade of the Imperial Center to its provinces, as guaranteed by imperial armies.
馅饼不是很大。它只能慢慢变大。它经常变小。没有人能接触到全部，而且地理上的暴政使贸易受到严格限制。人类确实在谁控制了停滞和破碎的馅饼的哪一部分上与自己进行了斗争。
The pie wasn’t very big. It could get bigger only slowly. It often got smaller. No one had access to the whole thing, and the tyranny of geography kept trade sharply circumscribed. Humanity did battle with itself over who controlled what slices of a stagnant and fractured pie.
然后，突然之间——从历史的角度来看——一切都变了。
Then, all at once—historically speaking—everything changed.
十五世纪之交的哥伦布探险引发了失控的互连连锁反应。深水航行首先使西班牙人和葡萄牙人以及后来的英国人以及每个人都能接触到接触海洋的每一块土地并与之互动。帝国仍然存在，但它们的经济基础已经改变，因为它们几乎可以在任何地方销售任何产品。随着更大系统现在更广泛的经济基础，当地的封建制度崩溃了。帝国战争需要更多的人。帝国的经济扩张需要更多的工人。帝国贸易催生了新的产业。在所有情况下，毫不掩饰的失败者都是封建领主，他们只能勉强维持生计。
The Columbus expeditions around the turn of the fifteenth century set off a runaway chain reaction of interconnectivity. Deepwater navigation enabled first the Spanish and Portuguese and later the British and, well, everybody to reach out and interact with every piece of land that touched ocean. Empires still existed, but their economic bases had changed because they could reach nearly any product nearly anywhere. With the now-broader economic bases of the larger systems, the economics of the local, feudal systems collapsed. Imperial wars required more people. Imperial economic expansion required more workers. Imperial trade generated new industries. In all cases the unabashed losers were the feudal lords, who could offer nothing but a near-subsistence existence.
随着几十年进入几个世纪，期望随着经济的变化而改变。馅饼不再单一和停滞不前。它在生长。它永远不会停止生长。而最重要的是，这就是我们所知道的世界。
As the decades ticked into centuries, expectations changed because the economics changed. No longer was the pie singular and stagnant. It was growing. It would never stop growing. And that, above all else, is the world we know.
更多产品。更多玩家。更大的市场。更多市场。运输更方便。更多的互连性。更多贸易。更多的资本。更多技术。更多的整合。金融渗透率更高。越来越大越来越大。
More products. More players. Bigger markets. More markets. Easier transport. More interconnectivity. More trade. More capital. More technology. More integration. More financial penetration. More and bigger and bigger and more.
一个更多的世界。
A world of more.
自从哥伦布扬帆出海以来，人类经济学就被这个概念所定义。世界在更多的理念中进化，这种对更多的合理期望最终摧毁了深水前帝国和封建制度的旧经济。新产品、新市场、新参与者、新财富、新互动、相互依赖和扩张需要新的方法来管理新的关系。人类开发了新的经济模式，其中最成功和最持久的模式被证明是法西斯社团主义、命令驱动的共产主义、社会主义和资本主义。这些系统之间的竞争——这些主义之间的竞争——定义了过去几个世纪的人类历史。
Ever since Columbus sailed the ocean blue, human economics have been defined by this concept of more. The world’s evolution within the idea of more, this reasonable expectation of more, is ultimately what destroyed the old economies of the pre-deepwater imperial and feudal systems. New products and markets and players and wealth and interactions and interdependencies and expansions required new methods of managing the new relationships. Humanity developed new economic models, with the most successful and durable ones proving to be fascist corporatism, command-driven communism, socialism, and capitalism. Competition among such systems—among these -isms—has defined the past few centuries of human history.
从本质上讲，所有经济模型都是分配系统：决定谁获得什么、何时获得以及如何获得。
At their core, all economic models are systems of distribution: deciding who gets what, when, and how.
- 资本主义是大多数美国人最熟悉的。这个想法是，政府应该有一个轻松的接触，并将大多数决定——特别是在消费和生产、供求、技术和通信方面——留给私人公民和公司。资本主义是美国的经济底线，但美国人并不是世界上唯一的资本家：日本、澳大利亚、瑞士、墨西哥、台湾、黎巴嫩和波罗的海国家都有自己的资本主义制度迭代。
- Capitalism is what most Americans are most familiar with. The idea is that government should have a light touch and leave most decisions—especially as regards consumption and production, supply and demand, technology and communication—to private citizens and firms. Capitalism is America’s economic baseline, but the Americans are hardly the world’s only capitalists: Japan, Australia, Switzerland, Mexico, Taiwan, Lebanon, and the Baltic states all have their own iterations of capitalist systems.
- 社会主义要么是常态（如果你在欧洲），要么是敌人（如果你是美国政治右翼）。在现代社会主义制度中，企业、政府和民众存在于一个不断变化的合作与斗争的万花筒中。然而，所有真正的社会主义结构的核心思想是政府作为经济体系不可分割的一部分。争论的焦点是政府的角色应该扮演多重要的角色，以及政府应该如何利用其权力和影响力来塑造或维持社会。加拿大和德国可能是运行良好的社会主义制度的当代最好例子。意大利、巴西和南非版本的社会主义可以。. . 使用一些工作。*
- Socialism is either the norm (if you’re in Europe) or the enemy (if you’re on the American political Right). In modern socialist systems, firms and government and the population exist in a shifting kaleidoscope of cooperation and struggle. The core idea to all truly socialist structures, however, is that government belongs as an inseparable part of the economic system. The debate is over how central the governmental role should be and how the government should use its power and reach to shape or maintain society. Canada and Germany are probably the best contemporary examples of well-run socialist systems. The Italian, Brazilian, and South African versions of socialism could . . . use some work.*
- 命令驱动的共产主义是社会主义走向荒谬的极端。这个想法是，政府是资本主义将外包给私营部门和民众的所有事情的唯一决定者。消除私人选择——以及完全消除私营部门——使政府能够调动社会的全部力量来实现任何需要解决的目标。苏联是使用命令驱动的共产主义的最大和最成功的国家，但它的版本已经出现在许多政治精英所在的地方特别是。. . 专横。尽管在政治上积极“反共”，但冷战初期的韩国是一个运行极其良好、相当封闭、由命令驱动的系统。*
- Command-driven communism is socialism carried to its absurd extreme. The idea is that the government is the sole decider of all the things capitalism would outsource to the private sector and population. Eliminating private choice—and the private sector altogether—enables the government to direct the full power of society to achieve whatever goal needs tackling. The Soviet Union is the biggest and most successful country to use command-driven communism, but versions of it have popped up in many places where the political elite is particularly . . . bossy. Early Cold War–era South Korea was an exceedingly well-run, fairly closed, command-driven system, despite politically being vigorously “anti-communist.”*
- 法西斯社团主义是我们不常想到的一种；它融合了商业领导和国家领导。政府最终发号施令，显然它协调企业朝着政府目标努力，但关键词是“协调”。公司与政府有联系并受政府指导，但通常不是政府经营的。在运行良好的法西斯经济中，政府可以选择私营部门来实现政府制定的广泛目标，例如，建造高速公路或消灭犹太人。但在大多数情况下，日常管理由公司自己负责。希特勒德国显然是现代法西斯社团主义制度的主要典范，而冷战后期的韩国在转向更资本主义/社会主义的方向之前经历了几十年的法西斯主义。当代“共产主义”中国更像法西斯主义而不是社会主义，更不用说共产主义了。后阿拉伯之春的埃及也是如此。
- Fascist corporatism is one we don’t often think about; it fuses business leadership with state leadership. The government ultimately calls the shots and it obviously coordinates firms to work toward government goals, but the key word is “coordinate.” Firms are government-linked and government-directed, but not as a rule government-operated. In a well-run fascist economy, the government can co-opt the private sector to achieve broad government-derived goals, like, say, building an autobahn or wiping out the Jews. But for the most part, day-to-day management is left up to the firms themselves. Hitlerite Germany is obviously the leading example of a modern fascist-corporatist system, while late Cold War–era South Korea put in a couple of fascist decades before segueing in a more capitalist/socialist direction. Contemporary “Communist” China far more closely resembles fascism than socialism, much less communism. The same goes for post–Arab Spring Egypt.
每个模型都有自己的优点和缺点。资本主义牺牲平等以最大化经济和技术增长。社会主义在包容性和社会平静的祭坛上牺牲了增长。命令驱动的共产主义取消了活力，而是以稳定和专注的成就为目标。法西斯社团主义试图在不牺牲增长或活力的情况下实现国家目标，但代价是民众的意愿、大规模暴力的国家、令人敬畏的腐败程度，以及知道国家支持的种族灭绝只是一种痛苦的恐惧几笔之遥。资本主义和社会主义与民主以及随之而来的所有政治噪音和混乱广泛兼容。命令驱动的共产主义和法西斯社团主义更具政治色彩。. . 安静的。
Each model has its own pros and cons. Capitalism trades away equality to maximize growth, both economic and technological. Socialism sacrifices growth at the altar of inclusivity and social placidity. Command-driven communism writes off dynamism, instead aiming for stability and focused achievements. Fascist corporatism attempts to achieve state goals without sacrificing growth or dynamism, but at the cost of popular will, a massively violent state, epically awe-inspiring levels of corruption, and the gnawing terror of knowing that state-sponsored genocide is but a few pen strokes away. Capitalism and socialism are broadly compatible with democracy and all the political noise and chaos that comes with it. Command-driven communism and fascist corporatism are far more politically . . . quiet.
但我们在近几个世纪发展起来并在近几十年微调的所有这些主义的共同点是我们的世界即将缺乏的东西：更多。
But what all these -isms we have developed in recent centuries and fine-tuned in recent decades have in common is something our world is about to lack: more.
地缘政治告诉我们，二战后，尤其是冷战后的经济繁荣是人为的和短暂的。回到定义上更“正常”的事物需要 . . . 收缩。人口统计告诉我们，大众消费驱动型经济体的数量和总量已经见顶。2019 年，地球上 65 岁及以上的人口首次超过 5 岁及以下。到 2030 年，相对而言，退休人员的数量将增加一倍。
Geopolitics tells us the post–World War II and especially the post–Cold War economic booms were artificial and transitory. Going back to something more “normal” by definition requires . . . shrinkage. Demographics tells us that the number and collective volume of mass-consumption-driven economies has already peaked. In 2019 the Earth for the first time in history had more people aged sixty-five and over than five and under. By 2030 there will be twice as many retirees, in relative terms.
几乎所有拥有足够友好的地理位置以在没有美国安全支持的情况下也能实现发展的国家都已经发展起来了。几十年来，几乎所有国家都处于人口下降的末期。几乎所有的产品现在都老化到大规模淘汰的地步。
Nearly all countries that boast sufficiently friendly geographies to enable development without American security sponsorship have already developed. Nearly all have been in terminal demographic decline for decades. Nearly all are now aging into mass obsolescence.
另一方面，那些需要美国赞助但地理位置不佳的国家现在已经错过了机会。在这中间，那些近几十年来在美国赞助下成功发展的国家正在摆脱人口和地缘政治方面的影响。
On the other side, those countries without good geographies who need that American sponsorship have now missed their window. In the middle, those countries that managed to develop under American sponsorship in recent decades are having the demographic and geopolitical rug pulled out from under them.
结合地缘政治和人口统计，我们知道不会有新的大众消费系统。更糟糕的是，全球经济这块蛋糕不会简单地缩小，而是会缩小。由于美国的不作为，它正在分裂成一些非常不完整的部分。
Combine geopolitics and demographics and we know there will be no new mass consumption systems. Even worse, the pie that is the global economy isn’t going to simply shrink; it is being fractured into some very nonintegrated pieces, courtesy of American inaction.
想想你的家乡。如果制成品、食品和能源所需的一切都必须由它自己提供怎么办？即使你的家乡在上海或东京或伦敦或芝加哥，你也不可能过上现在的生活。Order 所做的是将世界的大部分封装到一个单一的“城镇”中，在那里我们都专注于我们擅长的事情——无论是采摘鳄梨、切割金属、提纯丁二烯，还是组装闪存驱动器或布线风力涡轮机或指导瑜伽。然后，我们用销售我们擅长的东西的收入来支付我们不擅长的项目和服务。它并不完美，但它推动了人类历史上最伟大的技术进步，将我们大多数人带入了数字时代，并创造了对更高水平教育的更大需求。
Think of your hometown. What if everything it needed for manufactured goods and food and energy, it had to provide itself? Even if your hometown were Shanghai or Tokyo or London or Chicago, it would be impossible for you to live your current life. What the Order has done is encapsulate the bulk of the world into a single “town” in which we all specialize in whatever we are good at—whether it be picking avocados or cutting metal or purifying butadiene or assembling flash drives or wiring wind turbines or instructing yoga. We then use the income from the sales of what we’re good at to pay for the items and services we aren’t good at. It isn’t perfect, but it has promoted the greatest technological advancement in human history, brought most of us into the Digital Age, and created ever-greater demand for ever-greater levels of education.
但这都不是“正常”世界的自然结果；相反，它是美国创造的安全和贸易秩序的人为结果。没有全球和平，世界就会变小。或者，更准确地说，一个大世界分裂成几个较小的世界（通常是相互对立的世界）。
But none of this is a natural outcome of the “normal” world; rather, it is instead an artificial outcome of the American-created security and trade Order. Without global peace, the world gets smaller. Or, put more accurately, the one big world breaks up into several smaller worlds (and oftentimes, mutually antagonistic worlds).
坦率地说，我们现有的主义严重无法应对即将到来的挑战。
To be blunt, our existing -isms are woefully unable to manage coming challenges.
- 没有增长的资本主义会产生巨大的不平等，因为那些已经拥有政治关系和财富的人会操纵这个体系，以控制不断缩小的馅饼中越来越大的一块。结果趋向于社会爆炸的方向。在许多例子中，它如何成为现实的三个例子是大萧条期间美国境内的无政府主义运动，唐纳德特朗普在锈带的崛起作为对该地区去工业化的反应，以及美国的普遍社会崩溃黎巴嫩内战。
- Capitalism without growth generates massive inequality, as those who already have political connections and wealth manipulate the system to control ever-bigger pieces of an ever-shrinking pie. The result tends in the direction of social explosions. Three, of many, examples of how it can go to pot are the anarchist movements within the United States during the Great Depression, the rise of Donald Trump in the Rust Belt as a reaction to the region’s deindustrialization, and the general societal collapse of the Lebanese Civil War.
- 社会主义的未来，如果有的话，是更黑暗的。即使馅饼在扩大，社会主义也无法产生资本主义水平的增长，更不用说在馅饼缩小的时候了。社会主义或许能够保持经济平等，但这不太可能挽救这种模式。与资本主义不同，至少精英们可能能够通过斗争度过难关，而在社会主义中，每个人的境况每年都会明显变差。群众起义和国家分裂几乎融入了这种特定的甜点产品。
- The future of socialism is, if anything, darker. Socialism cannot generate capitalist levels of growth even when the pie is expanding, much less when it is shrinking. Socialism might be able to preserve economic equality, but that’s unlikely to save the model. Unlike capitalism, where at least the elites might be able to struggle through, in socialism everyone will become noticeably worse off every year. Mass uprisings and state fracture are pretty much baked into that particular dessert product.
- 法西斯社团主义可能会提供一种选择，将大部分经济临床管理外包给大公司。但最终它将面临与资本主义和社会主义相同的问题——权力集中于企业导致不平等，蛋糕缩小导致停滞恶化——而且由于政府显然在负责手指指向过渡到干草叉行进不会花很长时间。
- Fascist corporatism might provide an option by outsourcing much of the clinical management of the economy to large corporations. But ultimately it will face the same problems as capitalism and socialism—inequality from concentrating power with firms, degrading stagnation from a shrinking pie—and since the government is clearly in charge it wouldn’t take long for finger-pointing to transition into pitchfork-marching.
- 这就只剩下命令驱动的共产主义了。可悲的是，它可能是四个中最可行的。但前提是它粉碎了民众的灵魂，以至于有意见被1984 年式的宣传独裁统治所压制。当然，它会保留我们所知道的模型的所有常见缺点：只有那些运行指令经济的人正确猜测哪些技术将胜出、需要哪些商品以及如何获得相关投入，它才会真正起作用制作它们。每一个。单身的。时间。
- That just leaves command-driven communism. Sadly, it just might be the most viable of the four. But only if it crushes the population’s souls to the degree that having an opinion is suppressed by an overarching, 1984-style propagandaesque dictatorship. And of course, it will retain all the normal shortcomings of the model as we know it: it really only works if those running the command economy guess correctly on which techs will win out and which goods will be needed and how to access the relevant inputs to make them. Every. Single. Time.
我们不仅仅是在关注人口结构引发的经济崩溃；我们正看着 50 年经济史的终结。
We aren’t simply looking at a demographically induced economic breakdown; we are looking at the end of a half millennium of economic history.
目前，我认为只有两种先前存在的经济模型可能适用于我们正在（发展）进入的世界。两者都很老派：
At present, I see only two preexisting economic models that might work for the world we’re (d)evolving into. Both are very old-school:
第一个是普通的帝国主义。为此，有关国家必须拥有军队，尤其是拥有能够进行大规模两栖攻击的强大海军的国家。军队冒险征服领土和人民，然后以任何它希望的方式剥削这些领土和人民：强迫被征服的劳动力制造产品，剥夺被征服领土的资源，将被征服的人民视为其产品的俘虏市场，等等。鼎盛时期的大英帝国在这方面表现出色，但老实说，任何其他在其名称中使用“帝国”一词的后哥伦布政治实体也是如此。如果这听起来像是大规模奴役，主奴之间存在一些地理和法律上的位移，那么你的思考方向是正确的。
The first is plain ol’ imperialism. For this to work, the country in question must have a military, especially one with a powerful navy capable of large-scale amphibious assault. That military ventures forth to conquer territories and peoples, and then exploits said territories and peoples in whatever way it wishes: forcing conquered labor to craft products, stripping conquered territories of resources, treating conquered people as a captive market for its own products, etc. The British Empire at its height excelled at this, but to be honest, so did any other post-Columbus political entity that used the word “empire” in its name. If this sounds like mass slavery with some geographic and legal displacement between master and slave, you’re thinking in the right general direction.
第二种是所谓的重商主义，在这种经济体系中，你严格限制任何人向你的消费者群出口任何东西的能力，但在这种经济体系中，你也可以将任何你能生产的产品塞进其他人的喉咙里。这种冲击通常是为了达到破坏当地生产能力的次要目标，因此从长远来看，目标市场取决于你。帝国时代的法国搞重商主义是理所当然的，但也是如此任何有前途的工业强国。众所周知，英国人在 1800 年代初期向德国人倾销了产品，而德国人在 1800 年代后期对他们能接触到的任何人都采取了同样的做法。人们可以（相当容易地）争辩说，重商主义或多或少是中国在 2000 年代和 2010 年代（在美国战略掩护下）的标准国民经济运行政策。
The second is something called mercantilism, an economic system in which you heavily restrict the ability of anyone to export anything to your consumer base, but in which you also ram whatever of your production you can down the throats of anyone else. Such ramming is often done with a secondary goal of wrecking local production capacity so the target market is dependent upon you in the long term. The imperial-era French engaged in mercantilism as a matter of course, but so too did any up-and-coming industrial power. The British famously product-dumped on the Germans in the early 1800s, while the Germans did the same to anyone they could reach in the late 1800s. One could argue (fairly easily) that mercantilism was more or less the standard national economic operating policy for China in the 2000s and 2010s (under American strategic cover, no less).
从本质上讲，这两种可能的模式都将着眼于吸干其他人的血，并将普遍经济混乱的痛苦从入侵者转移到被入侵者身上。可以说，从较小的馅饼中分得较大的一块。这两种模式在理论上都可能适用于一个更贫穷、更暴力、更分裂的世界——尤其是如果他们结婚了。但即使在一起，某种形式的帝国主义重商主义也面临着一个单一的、包罗万象的、可能是谴责的问题：
In essence, both possible models would be implemented with an eye toward sucking other peoples dry, and transferring the pain of general economic dislocation from the invaders to the invaded. Getting a larger slice of a smaller pie, as it were. Both models might theoretically work in a poorer, more violent, more fractured world—particularly if they are married. But even together, some version of imperialist mercantilism faces a singular, overarching, likely condemning problem:
枪太多，靴子不够。
Too many guns, not enough boots.
在过去的帝国（和商业）时代，当英国人（或德国人、法国人、荷兰人、比利时人、日本人、葡萄牙人、西班牙人或阿根廷人等）出现时，他们会带枪和将大炮运往其最高军事技术明显是长矛和刀子驱动的地区。在当地人决定最好按照他们被告知的去做之前，新来者通常不必举太多当地人的例子（假设他们活得足够长以做出决定）。拥有如此敏锐和明显的技术优势意味着占领者可以通过微小的海外力量保持控制。最好的例子可能是印度的英属印度。英国在他们的南亚殖民地通常拥有（远）少于 50,000 名士兵——有时少于 10,000 名——而当地人口超过 200 人万。按照每 4,000 人中只有一个人居住的典型高比例，就好像我的家乡爱荷华州马歇尔敦的人口试图占据密西西比河以西的整个美国。
In the old imperial (and mercantile) days, when the Brits (or Germans, or French, or Dutch, or Belgians, or Japanese, or Portuguese, or Spanish, or Argentines, etc.) showed up, they’d bring guns and artillery to regions whose peak military technologies were decidedly spear- and knife-driven. The newcomers didn’t typically have to make too many examples of the locals before the locals decided it would be best if they did what they were told (assuming they survived long enough to have a decision to make). Possessing such a sharp and obvious technological edge meant the occupiers could maintain control with tiny overseas forces. The best example is probably the British Raj in India. The British typically had (far) fewer than 50,000 soldiers in their South Asian colony—sometimes fewer than 10,000—to a local population of over 200 million. At the typical high ratio of one occupier per 4,000 occupied, it would be as if the population of my hometown of Marshalltown, Iowa, tried to occupy the entirety of the United States west of the Mississippi.
在一个一方工业化而另一方没有工业化的时代，这种数量上的不平衡是可行的。但随着印度人的技术变得越来越先进，英国人可以保持控制的想法在短时间内从令人侧目变成异常歇斯底里。它是印度人将英国人赶走只是时间和政治意愿的问题。*
In an era when one side was industrialized and the other was not, such a numerical imbalance could work. But as the Indians became more technologically sophisticated, the idea that the Brits could maintain control went from eyebrow-raising to inordinately hysterical in short order. It was only a matter of time and political will before the Indians sent the Brits packing.*
今天，世界上肯定有一些地区比其他地区工业化程度更高（武装更先进），但工业化世界和前工业化世界之间不再存在 19 世纪风格的巨大鸿沟。想一想美国（一个处于领先地位的国家）试图重塑阿富汗（一个处于垫底的国家）有多么有趣。不需要在枪支、铁路、沥青、电力、计算机和电话方面取得卓越成就，就能仍然拥有枪支、铁路、沥青、电力、计算机和电话。
Today there are certainly parts of the world that are more industrialized (and better armed) than others, but there no longer is a nineteenth-century-style yawning chasm between an industrialized world and a preindustrial world. Consider how much fun the United States (a country near the head of the pack) had attempting to reshape Afghanistan (a country near the bottom). It doesn’t take excellence in guns and railroads and asphalt and electricity and computers and phones to still have guns and railroads and asphalt and electricity and computers and phones.
在 2022 年后的世界中，唯一可能能够维持海外帝国的国家是那些可以拥有三样东西的国家：严重的文化优势情结、能够可靠地将力量投射到无法有效抵抗的地区的军队，以及很多很多很多很多一次性的年轻人。
The only countries in a post-2022 world that might be able to maintain an overseas empire are those that can have three things going for them: a serious cultural superiority complex, a military capable of reliably projecting power onto locations that cannot effectively resist, and lots and lots and lots and LOTS of disposable young people.
上一个拥有这种综合因素的国家是二战后的美国。美国在 1800 年代和 1900 年代初期的崛起是技术、地理、人口和经济方面的，但当 1945 年枪声平息时，美国佬享有技术、地理、人口、经济和军事以及战略和数量优势。但即便如此，美国人还是选择不占领他们征服的领土——即使他们的潜在臣民欢迎他们作为解放者。今天，我们生活在一个人口加速崩溃的世界。没有_以具有成本效益和持续性的方式向其邻国投射力量所必需的青年组合而自豪的国家。
The last country that boasted that combination of factors was the United States in the World War II aftermath. America’s rise in the 1800s and early 1900s was technological, geographic, demographic, and economic, but when the guns fell silent in 1945, the Yanks enjoyed technological, geographic, demographic, economic and military and strategic and numerical advantages. But even then, the Americans chose not to occupy the territory they had conquered—even when their potential subjects had welcomed them as liberators. Today we live in a world of accelerating demographic collapse. There are no countries who boast the mix of youth and reach necessary to project power out of their own neighborhood on a cost-effective, sustained basis.
最好的管理方式是前深水时代，由地方超级大国建立的区域帝国以最粗鲁的方式统治着他们的社区：通过直接恐吓和/或征服。和即便如此，我也很难看到这对除法国或土耳其以外的任何国家都有效，这些国家拥有稳定的人口结构、强大的工业基础，并且比未来可能的新殖民地拥有非常大的技术优势。*任何更多的东西都将是一个数字游戏，很少有国家在理论上什至可以玩，更不用说玩得足够好以至于付出的努力可以收回成本。讨论可能的经济模型的目的不是要让您沮丧（尽管在我看来这是一个完全合理的结论），甚至也不是要指出最合理的结果。
The best that might be managed is a pre-deepwater era, regional empire set up with local superpowers dominating their neighborhoods in the rudest sort of way: via direct intimidation and/or conquering. And even then, I have a hard time seeing this working for any countries aside from France or Turkey, countries who have stable demographic structures, strong industrial bases, and a very large tech edge over their possible future neo-colonies.* Anything more would be a numbers game that few countries in few places could even theoretically play, much less play well enough that the effort could pay for itself. The point of this discussion into possible economic models isn’t to depress you (although in my opinion that’s a perfectly reasonable takeaway), or even to put a finger on what outcome is most plausible.
相反，它强调两个结果：
Instead, it is to underline two outcomes:
首先，一切将会改变。无论世界发展出什么样的新经济体系，我们今天都不太可能认为它是可行的。我们可能需要更多的资本（退休人员像海绵一样吸收它），但我们拥有的资本会少得多（更少的工人意味着更少的纳税人）。这表明经济增长和技术进步（两者都需要资本作为投入）将停滞不前。而这只是一方面。资本主义和法西斯主义以及其他旨在平衡或管理的一切——供应、需求、生产、资本、劳动力、债务、稀缺性、物流——与其说是扭曲，不如说是演变成我们作为一个物种从未经历过的形式。我们正在进入一个极端转型的时期，我们的战略、政治、经济、技术、人口、当然，我们将转向不同的管理系统。
First, everything is going to change. Whatever new economic system or systems the world develops will be something we’re unlikely to recognize as being viable today. We will probably need far higher volumes of capital (retirees absorb it like sponges), but we’ll have far less of it (fewer workers means fewer taxpayers). That suggests economic growth and technological progress (both of which require capital as an input) will stall out. And that’s just one facet. Everything that capitalism and fascism and the rest were designed to balance or manage—supply, demand, production, capital, labor, debt, scarcity, logistics—isn’t so much contorting as evolving into forms we have literally never experienced as a species. We are entering a period of extreme transformation, with our strategic, political, economic, technological, demographic, and cultural norms all in flux at the same time. Of course we will shift to a different management system.
其次，这个过程将是创伤的定义。几个世纪以来，更多的概念一直是我们作为一个物种的指路明灯。从某种角度来看，过去 70 年的全球化只不过是“更”打了类固醇，这是对我们长期以来珍视的经济理解的急剧吸收。在人口结构倒置和全球化结束之间，我们不仅仅是结束了我们长期拥有更多的经验，甚至开始了一个可怕的更少的新世界；我们面临经济自由落体因为自文艺复兴以来支撑人类经济存在的一切都同时消失了。
Second, the process will be the very definition of traumatic. The concept of more has been our guiding light as a species for centuries. From a certain point of view, the past seventy years of globalization have simply been “more” on steroids, a sharp uptake on our long-cherished economic understandings. Between the demographic inversion and the end of globalization, we are not simply ending our long experience with more, or even beginning a terrifying new world of less; we face economic free fall as everything that has underpinned humanity’s economic existence since the Renaissance unwinds all at once.
在全球秩序崩溃和全球人口结构倒置之间，旧规则显然行不通，我们需要几十年的时间才能弄清楚什么可能。不同的国家会以不同的方式感受到旧制度以不同的速度崩溃，他们将根据自己的优势和劣势以及文化和地理位置形成的方法来应对这种刺激。发展新主义也不会在可控的情况下从容不迫地完成。它将发生在人口和地缘政治崩溃的此时此地。
Between the collapse of the global Order and the inversion of global demographics, the old rules clearly don’t work, and it will take us decades to figure out what might. Different countries will feel the old system breaking down at different speeds in different ways, and they will react to such stimuli using approaches shaped by their own strengths and weaknesses and cultures and geographic positions. Nor will developing a new -ism be done under controlled circumstances over a leisurely period. It will happen in the here and now of demographic and geopolitical collapse.
我们不会在第一次尝试时就做对。我们不会遵循相同的前进道路。我们不会到达同一个目的地。我们的世界花了几个世纪的时间才得出我们目前的四重经济模型。这是一个过程，而不是一个在可预测的、稳重的、直线上进行的过程。上一次人类与需要新经济模式的不断变化的因素作斗争，其原因是工业革命和第一次全球化浪潮。我们激烈地争论哪种系统可能是最好的。我们吵架了。我们有过战争。我们有过大战。大多数都不冷。
We are not going to get this right on our first try. We will not follow the same paths forward. We will not arrive at the same destination. It took our world centuries to suss out our current quartet of economic models. It is a process, and not one that proceeds in a predictable, sedate, straight line. The last time humanity struggled with changing factors that necessitated new economic models, the causes were the Industrial Revolution paired with the first globalization wave. We argued—vigorously—over which system might be best. We had fights. We had wars. We had big wars. Most were not Cold.
经历历史是混乱的。
Living through history is messy.
乱七八糟的模型
Messy, Messy Models
既然我们都需要一杯酒，让我们来看几个成功的例子 。. . 类似。因为虽然我们的世界从未经历过像我们即将经历的事情，但一些国家的人口和地缘政治现实迫使他们比我们其他人更早地应对这一转变的前沿。我们可以从几个地方寻找灵感。或用于球门柱。或者至少对于地雷而言。
Now that we all need a fleet of drinks, let’s look at a couple of examples of what success might . . . resemble. For while our world has never experienced anything like what we’re about to go through, some countries’ demographic and geopolitical realities have forced them to deal with this transformation’s leading edge sooner than the rest of us. There are a couple of places we can look to for inspiration. Or for goalposts. Or at least for land mines.
我有两个供你考虑。
I have two for you to consider.
俄罗斯 。. . 作为一个成功的故事
RUSSIA . . . AS A SUCCESS STORY
虽然俄罗斯的一切都是而且一直都是自己完成的。. . 以独特的方式，不可否认的是，俄罗斯是第一批实现工业化的国家之一：仅次于英国，时间框架与德国相似。事实上，俄罗斯人和德国人相互交织的人口和工业化故事一直是欧洲从 1800 年代初到今天的故事。*
While everything in Russia is and always has been done in its own . . . peculiar way, it is undeniable that Russia was part of the first big batch of countries to industrialize: after the Brits and on a similar time frame to the Germans. The intertwined demographic and industrialization stories of the Russians and Germans, in fact, have been the story of Europe from the early 1800s right up to the current day.*
但是，尽管德国人利用美国主导的秩序实现了增值规模的巨大飞跃，并将其经济从工业化经济转变为更加以出口为导向的技术官僚结构，但苏联是秩序的目标，因此可以做到都不是。相反，苏联人走上了命令驱动的共产主义道路。在军事领域之外，俄罗斯根本跟不上美国主导的世界的技术活力。随着岁月累积成几十年，苏联经济在复杂性方面趋于稳定，1960 年代和 70 年代几乎所有的经济增长都不是来自技术或生产力，而是来自劳动适龄人口的扩大。更多的投入，更多的产出。
But whereas the Germans used the American-led Order to take a quantum leap up the value-added scale and turn their economy from an industrialized one to a more export-oriented, technocratic structure, the Soviet Union was the Order’s target and so could do none of that. Instead, the Soviets went down the road of command-driven communism. Outside of the military realm, Russia simply could not keep up with the technological dynamism of the American-led world. As the years stacked up into decades, the Soviet economy plateaued in terms of sophistication, and nearly all economic growth in the 1960s and 1970s wasn’t from technology or productivity, but instead from an expansion of the working-age population. More inputs, more outputs.
要相信苏联会长期继续运作，你必须相信苏联人口会继续增长，而这不可能。在世界大战的破坏、斯大林温和的城市化和集体化努力、赫鲁晓夫领导下的大规模管理不善以及勃列日涅夫领导下的组织停滞之间，苏联不再产生足够数量的新工人。到 1980 年，人口管道已经枯竭。. . 然后底部掉了下来。苏联解体的创伤是经济、文化、政治、战略和人口方面的。1986 年至 1994 年间，出生率减半，而死亡率几乎翻了一番。今天的俄罗斯正在去工业化，同时其人口正在崩溃。
To believe the Soviet Union would continue to function over the long haul, you had to believe that the Soviet population would continue growing, and that just wasn’t in the cards. Between devastation in the world wars, Stalin’s tender urbanization and collectivization efforts, broad-scale mismanagement under Khrushchev, and organizational stagnation under Brezhnev, the Soviet Union stopped generating sufficient numbers of new workers. By 1980 the demographic pipeline was already running dry . . . and then the bottom fell out. The trauma of the Soviet collapse was economic, cultural, political, strategic—and demographic. Between 1986 and 1994, the birth rate halved while the death rate nearly doubled. Russia today is deindustrializing at the same time its population is collapsing.
黑暗的？是的，但对于大部分工业化国家而言，俄罗斯可能是最好的情景之一。毕竟，除了足够的核武器外，俄罗斯至少在国内拥有充足的能力来养活自己，让任何潜在的侵略者在发动攻击之前停下来思考（几十次）。在一个贸易和资本受限的世界里，与仍然拥有战略纵深以及相当可靠的食物、燃料和电力相比，一个人可能会陷入更加可怕的困境。
Dark? Yes, but Russia is probably one of the best-case scenarios for much of the industrialized world. Russia, after all, at least has ample capacity at home to feed and fuel itself in addition to sufficient nuclear weapons to make any would-be aggressor stop and think (a few dozen times) before launching an assault. In a world of constrained trade and capital, one could be in significantly more dire straits than still having strategic depth plus reasonably reliable food, fuel, and electricity.
但是，为成长后生活做准备的黄金标准在别处。
But the gold standard in terms of preparing for a postgrowth life is elsewhere.
日本：优雅地变老
JAPAN: GROWING OLD GRACEFULLY
五年多来，日本一直走在人口被遗忘的道路上。自第二次世界大战以来，极端的城市化一直是常态，东京无处不在的公寓根本没有足够的空间轻松养家糊口，更不用说规模庞大的家庭了。老龄化过程根深蒂固，约有三万日本人死在自己的公寓里每年都没有人注意到，直到有一个 . . . 闻。需要熏蒸。早在 1990 年代，日本就在其人口结构方面走过了不归路，但日本政府和企业界并没有爬进洞里死去，而是长期以来以反映该国潜在人口弱点和优势的方式进行扩张。
Japan has been on the path to demographic oblivion for more than five decades. Extreme urbanization has been the norm since World War II and there simply isn’t enough space in Tokyo’s omnipresent condos to easily raise families, much less families of size. The aging process is so deeply entrenched that some thirty thousand Japanese die in their apartments every year without anyone noticing until there’s a . . . smell. Necessitating fumigation. Japan passed the point of no return in its demographic structure back in the 1990s, but rather than crawl into a hole and die, the Japanese government and corporate world have long since branched out in ways that reflect the country’s underlying demographic weaknesses—and strengths.
日本公司意识到他们当地的人口结构很糟糕，但他们也意识到，在国内大量生产产品需要他们不再拥有的年轻工人，而将上述产品倾销到其他市场通常被认为有些粗鲁。所以日本人选择了一些新的东西：去包。
Japanese firms realize their local demographics are wretched, but they also realize that building products en masse at home requires young workers that they no longer have, and that dumping said products on other markets is often construed as somewhat rude. So the Japanese have opted for something new: desourcing.
日本公司已将其大部分工业生产能力转移到其他国家，在那里他们使用更多的当地工人生产商品，然后销往相同的当地市场。然后，这些销售的部分收入会流回日本，以维持（不断老龄化的）日本人口。设计和技术以及非常高端的制造工作——由高技能、年长的人完成的那种工作工人——留在日本，但几乎整个制造业供应链的其余部分都位于国界的另一边。本质上，日本人在 1980 年代阅读了墙上的文字。他们看到他们的美国安全担保人如何憎恨产品倾销，并开始了数十年的努力，而不是在他们的目标市场内制造商品。尤其是，这种“在销售地制造”的概念已成为丰田公司新的企业口头禅。
Japanese firms have relocated much of their industrial productive capacity to other countries, where they use more abundant local workers to produce the goods that are then sold into those same local markets. Then some of the income from those sales flows back to Japan to sustain the (ever-aging) Japanese population. Design and technical and very high-end manufacturing work—the sort of work done by high-skilled, older workers—is kept in Japan, but almost the entirety of the rest of the manufacturing supply chain is located on the other side of national borders. In essence, the Japanese read the writing on the wall in the 1980s. They saw how their American security guarantor resented product dumping and started a multi-decade effort to instead manufacture goods within their target markets. In particular, this concept of “build where you sell” has become Toyota’s new corporate mantra.
这种新的工业模式使日本能够在一定程度上优雅地老去。但是有几个明显的问题。
This new industrial model has enabled Japan to age with a degree of grace. But there are a couple of glaring problems.
首先，日本经济停滞不前。在通胀调整后的情况下，日本经济在 2019 年比 1995 年要小。无法与自己的人口一起建造和销售的部分原因是你需要移动一些目标。即使在后增长世界取得了巨大的经济成功，也不会带来太大的增长。
First, Japan’s economy has stalled. In inflation-adjusted terms, the Japanese economy was smaller in 2019 than it was in 1995. Part and parcel of not being able to build and sell with and to your own population is that you need to move some goalposts. Even outsized economic success in a postgrowth world just doesn’t have much, well, growth.
其次，日本的道路极不可能被复制。毕竟，1980-2019 年的日本经历在很多方面都是独一无二的。
Second, it is exceedingly unlikely that Japan’s path is replicable. After all, the Japanese experience of 1980–2019 is in many ways unique.
- 日本向后增长体系的转变发生在美国铁定的安全掩护下。东京从来不必担心自己在国内的人身保护。当代美国的冷漠表明大多数国家将无法获得此类保险。
- Japan’s transformation to a postgrowth system occurred under ironclad American security cover. Tokyo never had to fear for its own physical protection at home. Contemporary America’s disinterest indicates such cover will not be available for most countries.
- 日本企业在国外没有面临严重的安全威胁，部分原因是冷战后环境我们现在都是朋友的性质，部分原因是美国人阻止了任何安全威胁的出现。美国离开世界意味着大多数国家——大多数贸易路线——将失去日本发展起来的那种铁定的保护。
- Corporate Japan faced no serious security threats abroad, in part because of the we’re-all-friends-now nature of the post–Cold War environment, and in part because the Americans prevented any security threats from arising. The American departure from the world means that most countries—most trade routes—will be bereft of the sort of ironclad protection the Japanese evolved under.
- 日本的转型发生在其公司进入全球消费市场，尤其是美国市场的时候。撇开人口老龄化不谈，美国的政治体系已经变得非常孤立，美国根本不会让世界保持贸易开放。美国当然不会对世界敞开大门向美国消费市场倾销产品。
- Japan’s transformation occurred when its firms had access to global consumer markets, most notably the American market. Aging demographics aside, the American political system has turned sharply insular and America simply is not going to be keeping the world open for trade. America certainly won’t keep the world open for dumping products on the American consumer market.
- 日本在转型之初非常富有。以人均计算，日本在 1980 年代后期变得与美国一样富有。日本人在国外建造的所有工厂都必须支付费用，日本人必须自己支付，但他们可以自己支付，因为虽然他们的人口结构正在转变，但他们还没有转变。当日本人在 1990 年代开始外包时，他们仍有大约 20 年的职能劳动力可以利用。今天，很少有国家可以宣称在财富方面拥有如此积极的起点，而且没有一个国家的税基或工人能力可以持续超过十年。
- Japan was wildly wealthy at the beginning of its transition. In per capita terms Japan became as wealthy as America in the late 1980s. All that industrial plant the Japanese built abroad had to be paid for, and the Japanese had to pay for it themselves, but they could pay for it themselves because while their demographics were turning, they had not turned yet. When the Japanese started desourcing in the 1990s, they still had roughly twenty years of a functional workforce to draw upon. Today there are precious few countries who can lay claim to such a positive starting point in terms of wealth, and none have a tax base or worker capacity that will last more than a decade.
- 日本的人口是世界上最单一的，超过 98% 的人口是纯日本人。这种团结促成了社会和经济变革，这些变革会在更多样化的人群中引发大规模动荡。
- Japan’s population is the world’s most homogeneous, with more than 98 percent of the population being purely ethnically Japanese. That unity enabled social and economic transformations that would have triggered mass upheaval in more diverse populations.
- 日本的防御能力非常强。日本是一个从未被成功入侵的群岛。甚至美国人也被征服本国岛屿的任务吓倒了，以至于他们选择了核武器广岛和长崎被迫投降，而不是将海军陆战队送入磨床。重点是：在没有美国监督的情况下，日本的防御需求是可以控制的，而且日本海军的规模也足以胜任本土防御任务。
- Japan is eminently defensible. Japan is an archipelago that has never been successfully invaded. Even the Americans were so daunted by the task of conquering the Home Islands that they opted to nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki to force surrender, rather than sending the Marines into the grinder. Point being: Japan’s defensive needs in a world without American overwatch are manageable, and the Japanese navy is right-sized to the task of home defense.
- 最后，与所有人口统计一样，日本拥有最关键的资产：时间。经济转型不会在一夜之间发生。从旧的日本经济模式在 1989 年股市和房地产市场崩盘中崩溃开始，日本用了30 年的时间过渡到已成为其新常态的状态。
- Finally, as with everything demographic, Japan had in spades the most critical asset: time. Economic transformation doesn’t happen overnight. From the point that the old Japanese economic model broke in the 1989 stock and property market crashes, Japan had three decades to transition to what has become its new normal.
很少有国家拥有熟练的劳动力和资本来尝试像日本模式那样进行外包。我想到了丹麦、荷兰、英国、新加坡、韩国和台湾。名单上的欧洲国家或许能够在有限的美国帮助下或与人口结构更稳定的法国建立伙伴关系来照顾自己的安全。至于亚洲国家，他们可能只能任由日本摆布以保护他们的安全。
There are precious few countries who boast the skilled labor and capital to attempt desourcing like the Japanese model. Denmark, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan come to mind. The European states on the list might be able to look after their own security with limited American help or perhaps a partnership with a more demographically stable France. As to the Asian states, they might be able to throw themselves at none other than Japan’s mercy for their security overwatch.
但对于他们所有人来说，他们将分包到哪里将是一个废话。
But for all of them it would be a crapshoot as to where they’d desource to.
在某种程度上，构成欧盟原始核心的西欧人在 2000 年代与他们接纳加入联盟的中欧人一起尝试了这一战略。但平均而言，中欧人的老龄化速度甚至超过西欧人，因此这一战略将在 2020 年代因自身的压力而崩溃。亚洲四小龙有可能将采购外包给东南亚国家，事实上其中一些已经发生了。但如果没有广泛的外部援助，它们都没有维持这种关系的军事能力。除美国外，任何人口结构健康的国家都更有可能成为经济和/或安全竞争对手因此，对于他们的投资资金来说，这是一个不明智的目的地。
To a degree, the Western Europeans who form the original core of the European Union have tried this strategy with the Central Europeans whom they admitted to the Union in the 2000s. But on average the Central Europeans are aging even faster than the Western Europeans, so this strategy will collapse under its own weight in the 2020s. The Asian Tigers have the possibility of desourcing to the Southeast Asian nations, and indeed some of that has already occurred. But none of them have the military capacity to sustain such a relationship without extensive external assistance. With the notable exception of the United States, any country with a reasonably healthy demographic is more likely to be an economic and/or security competitor and therefore an unwise destination for their investment funds.
转向新系统总是会很痛苦，而且大多数国家永远都不会成功。当我在 2016 年开始修改本书的核心思想时，我想我们应该有大约十五年的时间来解决问题。颠覆 50 年历史的时间短得可笑，但聊胜于无。但是，在 2020 年的头几周，突然间，悲惨地，可怕地，所有的希望都破灭了。
Shifting to a new system was always going to be painful, and most countries simply were never going to make the cut. When I started tinkering with the core ideas for this book back in 2016, I figured we’d have about fifteen years to figure things out. That’s a laughably short amount of time to upend a half millennium of history, but it was better than nothing. But then, suddenly, tragically, horribly, in the opening weeks of 2020, all hope fled.
去你的，冠状病毒
SCREW YOU, CORONAVIRUS
冠状病毒大流行不仅仅夺走了我们的生命。它剥夺了我们最需要的东西来为即将到来的人口灾难做准备。它剥夺了我们地球上没有人可以创造更多的东西。
The coronavirus pandemic didn’t simply rob us of lives. It robbed us of what we needed more than anything else to prepare for the coming demographic devastation. It robbed us of the one thing no one on Earth can make more of.
它抢走了我们的时间。
It robbed us of time.
2019 年 11 月，被世人称为新型冠状病毒 2019（COVID-19，简称 COVID）的病原体开始在中国湖北省流行。极度注重面子的地方当局压制了有关感染率上升的报告。甚至对他们的上级。甚至医护人员. 尽管许多各级政府在以惊人的方式以惊人的次数对危机进行错误管理时表现出惊人的创造力，但正是这种压制信息的第一个决定将当地的健康问题转变为全球大流行病。COVID 是自麻疹以来侵入普通人群的最具传染性的疾病，并且 COVID 的致死率高出五倍。在撰写本文时（2022 年 2 月），全球有超过 3 亿人被诊断出患有 COVID，其中 600 万人死亡。*
In November 2019, the pathogen the world would come to know as the novel coronavirus-2019—COVID-19, or simply COVID, for short—began circulating in the Chinese province of Hubei. Hyper face-conscious local authorities suppressed reporting of rising infection rates. Even to their superiors. Even to medical personnel. While many governments at many levels have shown staggering levels of creativity in mismanaging the crisis in a staggering variety of ways a staggering number of times, it was this first decision to suppress information that transformed a local health concern into a global pandemic. COVID is the most infectious disease to break into the general population since measles, and COVID’s fatality rate is five times higher. At the time of this writing (February 2022), over 300 million people globally have been diagnosed with COVID, with 6 million of them perishing.*
COVID 几乎完全通过呼吸呼气传播，从经济角度来看，这已经很糟糕了。艾滋病毒可以被阻止用避孕套。癌症是不会传染的。心脏病主要是生活方式问题。获得破伤风需要用带刺铁丝网进行摔跤比赛。但是如果你可以通过呼吸传播或感染健康破坏者呢？我们出现了问题。人们住在室内。大多数业务都是在室内进行的。大多数食物是在室内吃的。大多数交通工具都是在关闭窗户的情况下运行的。COVID 深入并威胁到我们生存的方方面面。
COVID spreads almost exclusively via respiratory exhalation, which, from an economic point of view, is as bad as it gets. HIV can be stopped with condoms. Cancer isn’t communicable. Heart disease is largely a lifestyle issue. Getting tetanus requires a wrestling match with barbed wire. But if you can spread or catch a health destroyer by breathing? We have a problem. People live indoors. Most business is done indoors. Most food is eaten indoors. Most transport modes are operated with closed windows. COVID reached into and threatened every aspect of our existence.
处理呼吸道疾病的唯一有效方法是限制接触。口罩有帮助，但隔离更有帮助。COVID 缓解措施并没有关闭一切，但哇，它一次又一次地打击了大多数经济体。
The only effective means of dealing with a respiratory disease is to limit contact. Masks help, but isolation helps more. COVID mitigation efforts didn’t shut everything down, but wow, did it sucker-punch most economies over and over and over again.
这种容易传播的病原体的后果很多，但就我们的目的而言，有四个突出：
The outcomes of such an easily spread pathogen are legion, but for our purposes four stand out:
首先，人与人之间接触的减少和抑制直接转化为经济活动的减少和抑制，或者，正如其技术名称所熟知的那样：经济衰退。到 2020 年 8 月，很明显经济衰退不会是一次性的，而是会持续到普通人群实现群体免疫为止。到 2021 年 10 月时，我们了解到，因 COVID 当时占主导地位的 delta 变体遭受痛苦而产生的免疫反应在其产生的保护方面差异很大，但更重要的是，对于某些此类保护来说，这种保护只持续了几周。我们了解到接种疫苗是唯一合理的方法。*幸运的是，一系列疫苗于 2020 年 12 月开始投放市场，但由于对疫苗的犹豫和制造限制，大部分发达国家未能在 2021 年达到防止社区传播所需的 90% 的疫苗接种门槛，并且出现新变种不断移动“成功”的目标。
First, decreased and inhibited contact among people translates directly into decreased and inhibited economic activity, or, as it is known by its technical name: a recession. By August 2020 it was clear the downturn wasn’t going to be a one-off, but instead would persist until such time as the general population achieved herd immunity. By the time we reached October 2021 we learned that the immune response generated from suffering through COVID’s then-dominant delta variant varied wildly in the protection it generated, but more important, for some such protection lasted only a handful of weeks. We learned that vaccination was the only reasonable way to go.* Luckily, a series of vaccines started hitting the market in December 2020, but between vaccine hesitancy and manufacturing limitations, the bulk of the advanced world wasn’t able to reach the 90 percent vaccination threshold necessary to prevent community transmission in 2021, and new variants kept moving the goal posts for what “success” meant.
其次，我们经济“常态”的本质发生了空化。前 30 大经济体中的每一个都经历了封锁和破坏。直接衰退已经够糟糕了，但对生活方式的破坏改变了每个人消费的商品组合：更少的服务，更多的商品，以及更多非常特殊的商品，如电子产品和计算产品。随着每一次封锁和/或开放，我们的消费组合发生了变化，随着每一次封锁和/或开放，世界各地的制造商都试图改变他们的努力以满足变化的需求。每一项这样的努力都需要更多的工人、更多的投资和更多的时间。从技术上讲，每一项努力都会导致通货膨胀。. . 在越来越多的婴儿潮一代退休并转向固定收入的时候。在撰写本文时，即 2022 年初，世界工业家正在进行第九次与 COVID 相关的重组。
Second, the very nature of our economic “normal” cavitated. Every one of the top thirty economies experienced lockdown and disruption. Direct recessions were bad enough, but the disruption to lifestyle changed the portfolio of goods everyone consumed: fewer services, more goods, and more of very specific sorts of goods like electronics and computing products. With every lockdown and/or opening, our consumption portfolio shifted, and with every lockdown and/or opening, manufacturers the world over attempted to shift their efforts to meet the altered demand. Each such effort required more workers, more investment, and more time. Put technically, each effort was wildly inflationary . . . at a time when more and more Baby Boomers were taking retirement and moving on to fixed incomes. At the time of this writing, in early 2022, the world’s industrialists are on their ninth COVID-related retooling.
第三，如果目标是经济稳定，那么世界上以某种方式逃脱 COVID 的地区就是。. . 错误的部分。撒哈拉以南非洲地区表现不错，但坦率地说，该地区大部分地区的预期寿命太低，无法让许多人超过 70 岁。（所有因冠状病毒死亡的人中有一半以上是 75 岁或以上的人，因此感染这种疾病最多的人群根本不存在。）第二个地区是东亚，那里政府迅速而有力的反应被压垮了案件量。不幸的是，对于全球体系而言，撒哈拉以南非洲是一个次要参与者，合计仅占全球国内生产总值 (GDP) 的 1.9%，而所有东亚经济体以出口为导向。如果他们没有被感染，对全球消费没有多大影响。他们失去了销售市场。
Third, if the goal was economic stability, the parts of the world that somehow escaped COVID were . . . the wrong parts. Sub-Saharan Africa did reasonably well, but to be blunt, in most of the region life expectancy is simply too low to have many people aged over seventy. (More than half of all coronavirus deaths are in those aged seventy-five or over, so the demographic that most suffers from the disease simply doesn’t exist en masse.) The second region was East Asia, where quick and competent government responses crushed caseloads. Unfortunately for the global system, sub-Saharan Africa is a minor player, collectively generating only 1.9 percent of global gross domestic product (GDP), while all East Asian economies are export-led. It didn’t matter much to global consumption if they weren’t infected. They had lost markets to sell to.
第四，冠状病毒危机期间不相关的问题加剧，进一步破坏了全球联系。具体来说，特朗普政府正在与中国进行贸易战，而中国正在陷入自恋的民族主义。两者都推动所有以消费为导向的系统——包括美国——尽可能多地满足内部制造需求。无论是出于民族主义恐惧、民粹主义、健康、国家安全、政治还是就业等原因，几十年来日益主导制造业的复杂供应链都在积极解散。
Fourth, unrelated issues intensified during the coronavirus crisis to further fracture global connections. Specifically, the Trump administration was prosecuting a trade war with China, while China was descending into narcissistic nationalism. Both nudged all consumption-led systems—the United States included—to bring as much of their manufacturing needs in-house as possible. Whether for reasons of nationalistic fear, populism, health, national security, politics, or jobs, the complex supply chains that had increasingly dominated the manufacturing sector for decades aggressively unwound.
在撰写本文时，COVID 已经扰乱了世界上以消费为主导的地区超过两年。世界出口导向型地区将从出口导向型滑向后增长无论如何，2020 年代大部分下滑都发生在这十年的前半段。COVID削弱了出口导向型和消费导向型经济体之间的联系；这使大多数消费导向型经济体陷入了它们自己的部分封闭的世界，同时剥夺了出口导向型经济体为其系统提供燃料所需的出口销售以及它们为适应全球化之后的任何情况而调整其系统所需的过渡时间。
At the time of this writing, COVID already has disrupted the consumption-led part of the world for over two years. The export-led part of the world was going to slide from export-led to postgrowth in the 2020s regardless, with most of said sliding occurring in the decade’s first half. COVID weakened the connections between export-led and consumption-led economies; this hived most consumption-led economies off into their own partially sequestered worlds, while simultaneously denying the export-led economies of the export sales they needed to fuel their systems and the transition time they needed to adapt their systems to whatever comes after globalization.
全球化游戏并没有简单结束。已经结束了。大多数国家永远不会回到 2019 年的稳定或增长水平。现在大多数国家甚至失去了尝试转向更新、更合适的立足点的机会。
The globalization game is not simply ending. It is already over. Most countries will never return to the degree of stability or growth they experienced in 2019. And now most have lost the chance to even try to shift onto a newer, more appropriate footing.
最后一句话的关键词当然是“最”。
The key word in that last sentence, of course, is “most.”
最后一点
The Last Bits of More
很少有国家能够不顾一切地保持人口结构的火炬燃烧。他们的生活也会发生变化，但变化不会那么快，也不会那么剧烈或消极。比所有其他国家加起来更重要的是美国。
There are precious few countries who against all odds have kept the demographic torch burning. Life for them will change, too, but not nearly as quickly or drastically or negatively. The one that matters more than all others combined is the United States.
美国更多，第 1 部分：地理
THE AMERICAN MORE, PART 1: GEOGRAPHY
让我们从所有死记硬背的地理和战略内容开始。
Let’s start with all the rote geographic and strategic stuff.
- 美国拥有比任何其他国家都多的优质温带耕地，其整个农业供应链都在北美境内。这使美国成为世界上最大的农产品生产国和出口国。粮食安全完全不是问题。
- The United States has more high-quality, temperate-zone, arable farmland than any other country and its entire agricultural supply chain is contained within North America. This makes the United States the world’s largest agricultural producer and exporter. Food security is a complete nonissue.
- 美国拥有比世界上任何国家都多的适合居住的土地——气候适宜、相对平坦、水源良好、没有害虫等。就人均可用土地而言，美国可能会在感到拥挤之前支持目前 3.3 亿人口的两倍。
- America has more land suitable for habitation—reasonable climate, relatively flat, good water access, lack of pests, etc.—than any country in the world. In terms of usable land per person, the United States could probably support a population double its current 330 million before feeling crowded.
- 在水上移动物体的成本大约是在陆地上移动的十二分之一。得益于无处不在的内部水道——比世界其他地区的总和还要多——美国的内部运输成本低于其他任何国家。*
- Moving things around on water costs roughly one-twelfth that of moving them around on land. Courtesy of omnipresent internal waterways—more than the combined total of the rest of the world—the United States has lower internal transport costs than anyone else.*
- 得益于页岩革命，美国不仅是世界上最大的石油生产国，使其能够完全独立于石油，而且其页岩油生产的副产品使其成为世界上最低的无补贴电力成本。
- Courtesy of the shale revolution, not only is the United States the world’s largest oil producer, enabling it to be net oil-independent, but by-products of its shale oil production have granted it the lowest unsubsidized electricity costs in the world.
- 美国是距离赤道最近的第一世界国家，太阳能发电潜力比任何其他国家都大，而其山脉相对于海岸的位置使其风力发电潜力比任何其他国家都大。绿色或化石驱动的电力供应永远不会成为美国的问题。
- The United States is the first-world country closest to the equator, granting it more solar power potential than any other country, while the positioning of its mountains compared to its coasts gives it more wind power potential than any other country. Green- or fossil-driven, electricity supply will never be an American problem.
- 早在 2010 年，更便宜的投入——无论是以土地还是能源的形式——帮助引发了美国大规模的再工业化进程。这让美国在大规模的工业重组中抢先一步，而大规模的工业重组将主导 2020 年代的全球崩溃。
- Cheaper inputs—whether in the form of land or energy—helped trigger a massive reindustrialization process in America as early as 2010. That’s given the United States a head start on the broad-scale industrial reshufflings that will dominate the global breakdowns of the 2020s.
- 自 1840 年代以来，美国从未面临过来自北美大陆内部的安全威胁。沙漠和山脉使得从南方入侵根本不可能，而湖泊和森林（以及 10 比 1 的人口失衡）将北方入侵的概念限制在动画质量低、咒语重的领域电影。*
- The United States has not faced a security threat from within the North American continent since the 1840s. Deserts and mountains make an invasion from the south simply impossible, while lakes and forests (and a 10-to-1 demographic imbalance) limit the very concept of an invasion from the north to the realm of low-animation-quality, expletive-heavy film.*
- 美国人没有敌意，而是与加拿大人和墨西哥人合作，形成了一个综合的制造空间和贸易区。扩大的规模经济使区域制造足迹在质量和成本方面都处于世界一流水平。
- Instead of hostility, the Americans have worked with the Canadians and Mexicans to form an integrated manufacturing space and trade zone. The expanded economies of scale allow for a regional manufacturing footprint that is world-class in terms of both quality and cost.
- 大西洋和太平洋使美国几乎不受半球外入侵的影响。很少有国家拥有甚至可以独立穿越海洋的船只。要想对付美国，就得先过美国海军，美国海军的实力是世界其他国家海军总和的十倍。*
- The Atlantic and Pacific Oceans make the United States all but immune to extra-hemispheric invasion. Very few countries have any vessels that can even cross an ocean unaided. Should anyone want to take a crack at America, they’d have to first get past the U.S. Navy, which is ten times as powerful as the combined navies of the rest of the world.*
- 美国有核武器。成千上万的人。在剪刀石头布蜥蜴史波克核弹比赛中，核弹每次都获胜。
- America has nukes. Thousands of them. In a rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock-nuke contest, nukes win every single time.
底线：在一个没有更多资源的世界里，美国不仅拥有充足的资源，而且有能力保持它。
Bottom line: in a world without more, the United States not only still has plenty, it has the capacity to keep it.
但更妙的是，到目前为止，美国人在很大程度上已经设法摆脱了全球发展和人口陷阱。
But even better than that, to this point the Americans largely have managed to escape much of the global development and demographic trap.
美国更多，第 2 部分：婴儿潮一代和千禧一代
THE AMERICAN MORE, PART 2: THE BOOMERS AND THE MILLENNIALS
在第二次世界大战中在海外作战的 1700 万美国男性（占美国男性人口的 20% 以上）中，只有 40 万人回到了家乡。他们回家后准备继续他们的生活。退伍军人法案帮助他们接受教育。1956 年的艾森豪威尔州际法案启用了国家道路系统，使前士兵能够在任何地方定居。新的住房贷款计划使年轻的退伍军人能够购买或建造他们的第一套住房，并与新的州际公路系统相结合，推出了我们现在所知的郊区。
Of the 17 million American men—more than 20 percent of the American male population—who fought overseas in World War II, all but 400,000 came home. And they came home ready to get on with their lives. The GI Bill helped them get educations. The Eisenhower Interstate Act of 1956 enabled the national road systems that enabled the former soldiers to settle anywhere. New programs for home loans enabled the young veterans to purchase or build their first homes and in doing so, combined with the new Interstate Highway System, launched what we now know as the suburbs.
所有这些新的政府项目在很多方面都是美国人的首创。大多数是因为担心上次几百万美国士兵从战争中返回后的经济灾难重演而推出的。第一次世界大战后，士兵们的突然回归涌入了劳动力市场，造成了巨大的供过于求，引发了通货紧缩的恶性循环，从而导致了大萧条。
All these new government programs were in many ways the first of their kind for Americans. Most were launched for fear of a repeat of the economic disaster that followed the last time several million American soldiers returned from war. After World War I the soldiers’ sudden return had flooded the labor market, generating such massive oversupply that it triggered a deflationary spiral, which contributed to the Great Depression.
新计划的一个核心理由是利用政府支出来替代所有这些劳动力，或者将现在退伍军人送去大学几年以延缓痛苦。许多人争论（并且仍在争论）如此永久地扩大政府足迹的利弊，但不可否认的是，随着所有这些措施到位，美国经历了其历史上最大的婴儿潮。从战争结束到 1965 年，这个国家诞生了超过 7000 万新生儿战争有不到 1.35 亿人。婴儿潮一代的恐惧向我们所有人释放了出来。
A core rationale for the new programs was to use government spending to alternatively mop up all that labor, or ship the now-former soldiers off to university for a few years to defer the pain. Many debated (and still debate) the pros and cons of so permanently expanding the government’s footprint, but it is undeniable that with all these pieces in place, America experienced the greatest baby boom of its history. Between war’s end and 1965, more than 70 million births occurred in a country that before the war had under 135 million souls. The horror of the Baby Boomers was unleashed upon us all.
关于美国婴儿潮一代的故事没有尽头。他们是 1970 年代成年的人，创造了美国文化。迪斯科？他们的错。他们是精心打造美国福利国家的人，而他们正在进行的退休已经打破了联邦预算。他们是在第二次世界大战后兴起的新制造园区的阴影下长大的人，当时世界其他地方都遭到破坏，然后痛苦地看着这些相同的设施搬迁，因为世界其他地方在战争中恢复。命令。从越南到阿富汗，从约翰逊到特朗普，从公民权利到长期通勤，从性革命到技术失效，他们的集体决定和弱点恰恰决定了美国是。
There is no end of stories to tell about America’s Boomer generation. They are the ones who came of age during the 1970s, creating what passes for American culture. Disco? Their fault. They are the ones who crafted the American welfare state, and from it their in-progress retirement has broken the federal budget. They are the ones who grew up in the shadow of the new manufacturing complexes that sprouted up after World War II, when the rest of the world was wrecked, and then watched bitterly as those same facilities relocated as the rest of the world recovered under the Order. From Vietnam to Afghanistan, from Johnson to Trump, from civil rights to long commutes, from the sexual revolution to technological invalidity, their collective decisions and foibles have determined precisely what America is.
出于类似的公式化原因，世界其他大部分地区也有婴儿潮一代。战争的结束加上在美国赞助下的新时代（大部分没有战争）的到来，使大多数政府能够忙于处理人民的生活，而无需承担国防任务。尤其是欧洲各国政府花费了更多的时间和精力试图让他们的人民过上舒适的生活，而不是试图杀死所有的邻居。世界上许多国家的发达国家——并且经历了与更先进国家同样的死亡率下降——这是第一次。人口到处扩张。
Most of the rest of the world had a Boomer generation as well, and for similar formulative reasons. War’s end plus the dawning of the new (mostly war-free) age under American sponsorship enabled most governments to busy themselves with their people’s lives without needing to burden themselves with the task of national defense. European governments in particular spent a lot more time and energy trying to make their people’s lives comfortable, and a lot less trying to kill all their neighbors. Many countries the world over developed—and experienced the same reductions in mortality of the more advanced states—for the first time. Populations expanded everywhere.
但相对于战前人口，美国婴儿潮一代的骨干人数远远超过他们的全球同行。即使在独立后 170 年，人口增长了 30 倍，美国人仍然享有大量开阔的土地。美国人仍在向因消灭土著人而空置的领土发展。大量有用的土地意味着婴儿潮一代享有大量低成本、高回报的机会。相比之下，欧洲在几十年前就已经达到了其土地的承载能力，而且内部边界并没有太多障碍。即使在新兴的发展中国家，农村也不全是未开发的土地。
But relative to prewar populations, the American Boomers were a far larger cadre than their global peers. Even 170 years after independence and with a thirty-fold expansion in population, the Americans still enjoyed a lot of open land. The Americans were still growing into the territories made vacant by the eradication of the natives. Lots of useful land meant the Boomers enjoyed lots of low-cost, high-payout opportunities. In contrast, Europe had reached its lands’ carrying capacity decades previous and there just wasn’t much in the way of internal frontiers. Even in the newly developing countries, the countryside wasn’t exactly teeming with unused territories.
但那是过去，现在也是。当我们进入 2020 年代时，婴儿潮一代在很大程度上是一支精疲力尽的人口力量。2022 年和 2023 年是世界上大多数婴儿潮一代将年满 65 岁并退休的时候。
But that was then, and this is now. As we enter the 2020s, the Boomers are a largely spent demographic force. Calendar years 2022 and 2023 are when the majority of the world’s Boomers will have turned sixty-five and so shifted into retirement.
这对劳动力市场造成了双重打击。婴儿潮一代是有史以来人数最多的一代，因此他们的缺席在数字上影响巨大。他们也是从事经济活动的最年长的一代，这意味着他们的人数占所有可用技术劳动力的大部分。短时间内裁掉这么多高技能工人，未来几年劳动力短缺和劳动力通胀已成定局。
This generates a double hit to labor markets. The Baby Boomers are the largest-ever generation, so their absence is hugely impactful in numerical terms. They are also the oldest economically active generation, meaning that their numbers comprise the bulk of all available skilled labor. Remove so many high-skilled workers in a short period of time and labor shortages and labor inflation are a foregone conclusion for years to come.
下一代是 X 世代，这是一个目睹了前辈和 .. 的考验和艰辛的群体。. . 不喜欢他们所看到的。婴儿潮出生的人太多了，以至于当他们进入市场时，他们在工资上相互竞争，压低了劳动力成本。这迫使许多婴儿潮一代决定双收入家庭是勉强糊口的唯一途径。这不仅压低了劳动力成本，而且给人际关系带来了相当大的压力，导致婴儿潮一代的离婚率居高不下。X 世代试图避免这种情况结果，在某种程度上。与长辈相比，X 世代更有可能拥有单收入家庭，因为他们至少和金钱一样重视时间。
The next generation down is Generation X, a group that watched the trials and travails of their predecessors and . . . did not like what they saw. There were so many Baby Boomers that when they entered the market they outcompeted each other for wages, suppressing labor costs. This forced many Boomers to decide that two-income households were the only way to scrape by. That not only depressed labor costs more, but introduced considerable stress into interpersonal relationships, resulting in the Baby Boomers’ high divorce rate. Gen X has attempted to avoid this outcome, to a degree. Gen X is far more likely to have single-income households compared to their elders, as they value their time at least as much as their money.
X 世代已经是一个较小的一代，永远无法填补婴儿潮一代离开造成的巨大空洞，但随着劳动参与率的降低，结果将是更大的劳动力短缺。这对 X 世代来说很棒——那些选择工作的人将拥有迄今为止所有劳动力中最好的定价权！——但这对劳动力市场来说有点灾难。
Generation X was already a smaller generation, and was never going to be able to fill the cavernous hole caused by the Boomers’ departure, but with lower labor rate participation, the result will be a far larger labor shortage. That’s great for Gen X—those who choose to work will have the best pricing power of any workforce to date!—but it is a bit of a disaster for the labor market writ large.
秤的底部是 Zoomers。他们是热切的工人，但很少有人存在。Zoomers 是 X 世代的孩子。一小代产生一小代。所有将要出生的 Zoomers已经出生，即使他们都跟随婴儿潮一代而不是他们的父母的脚步并且他们都进入劳动力市场，但他们中的人数还远远不足以补充劳动力。在接下来的二十年里。
At the bottom of the scale are the Zoomers. They are eager workers, but very few exist. The Zoomers are the children of Gen X. A small generation generates a small generation. All the Zoomers that will be born have already been born, and even if they all follow in the footsteps of the Baby Boomers instead of their parents and they all enter the workforce, there are nowhere near enough of them to round out the labor force. For the next two decades.
就这一点而言——婴儿潮一代、X 世代和 Zoomers——这幅图景在全球范围内适用，但现在却出现了分歧，因为美国的婴儿潮一代做了一件他们的全球同行没有做的事情。他们有孩子。很多。_ 说说你对美国千禧一代的看法——是的，我们可以说很多——他们有一些全球几乎没有其他千禧一代干部能为他们做的事情。
To this point—Boomers, Gen Xers, and Zoomers—the picture holds globally, but now it diverges, because America’s Boomers did one thing their global peers did not. They had kids. A lot of them. Say what you will about America’s Millennial generation—and yes, there is a lot we can say—they have something going for them that nearly no other Millennial cadre globally does.
它们存在。
They exist.
总体而言，美国千禧一代人口群体分为两类。第一个符合权利和懒惰的刻板印象，并在大学和进入劳动力市场之间度过了一个延长的青春期。第二 。. . 被搞砸了：他们试图成为成年人，但由于婴儿潮一代将他们挤出劳动力市场，以及 2007-09 年金融危机引发的大规模失业，他们都被打败了。无论桶如何，千禧一代失去了多年有意义的工作经验，今天是现代美国历史上任何同等年龄组中技能最低的。
Overall, the American Millennial demographic group falls into two categories. The first match the stereotype of entitlement and laziness and taking an extended adolescence between college and entering the workforce. The second . . . got screwed: they attempted to be adults, but got sideswiped by the combination of Boomers squeezing them out of the workforce, and the mass unemployment triggered by the 2007–09 financial crisis. Regardless of bucket, the Millennials lost years of meaningful work experience, and today are the least skilled of any equivalent age cohort in modern American history.
但是他们很多。按人数计算，美国千禧一代已经是劳动力中最大的群体。那太棒了。这是必不可少的。但真正的希望在他们的孩子身上。美国千禧一代的人数增加了他们将来有足够的孩子来填补劳动力缺口的可能性。但最快会发生在这些孩子进入劳动力市场时。. . 一个过程要到 20 世纪40 年代中期才会开始。这里仍然存在风险：千禧一代必须首先拥有这些孩子，这是一个不小的问题。目前，千禧一代的出生率是美国历史上最低的。
But they are many. The American Millennials are already the largest demographic in the workforce by number. That’s great. That’s essential. But the real hope is with their children. The American Millennials’ numbers raise the possibility that they will have enough children to someday fill the labor gap. But the soonest that will happen is when those children enter the labor force . . . a process that will not begin until the mid-2040s. And there is still risk here: there’s the not-so-minor issue that the Millennials must first have those children. At present, birth rates for Millennials are the lowest in American history.
因此，对于美国来说，千禧一代尽管存在种种缺陷，但在一定程度上正在完善劳动力队伍。许多措施都不够充分，但千禧一代的存在本身既是现在的加分，也是以后希望的源泉。
So for the United States, the Millennials for all their imperfections are rounding out the labor force to a degree. An insufficient degree by many measures, but the Millennials’ very existence is both a plus now and a source of hope for later.
在美国之外，情况要暗得多，原因很简单，世界上大多数婴儿潮一代没有孩子。这种缺乏繁殖的原因因地而异。东亚已经人口稠密；大规模城市化没有帮助。大多数欧洲国家都把钱花在了技术升级上，而不是让养家糊口变得更容易。加拿大太冷了，每个人都涌向城市取暖，因为这是一个选择，而公寓是家庭规模缩小的最终因素，无论它们位于何处或人们为什么住在里面。
Beyond the United States, the picture is much darker, for the simple reason that most of the world’s Boomer cohort didn’t have kids. The reasons for this lack of reproduction vary greatly from place to place. East Asia was already densely populated; mass urbanization didn’t help. Most of Europe spent its money on technical upgrades rather than making it easier to raise families. Canada is so cold everyone flocked to cities for warmth as soon it was an option, and apartments are the ultimate downsizing factor for family size no matter where they are located or why people live in them.
所以，是的，美国婴儿潮一代进入大规模退休阶段将会倾家荡产。但是，与全球规范相比，它们的相对规模较小，而它们的后代对政府底线的贡献越来越大，与将彻底摧毁中国、韩国等不同国家的治理体系的流星群挑战相比，它们的财务重击微不足道、日本、泰国、巴西、德国、意大利、波兰、俄罗斯和伊朗。与此同时，美国千禧一代的存在意味着美国将至少部分地从 2030 年代的金融紧缩中复苏，并可能从 2040 年代的劳动力紧缩中复苏。但对于世界其他地区来说，它永远不会比 2010 年代更好。绝不。
So, yes, American Boomers aging into mass retirement will break the bank. But between their smaller relative size as compared to global norms and their offspring’s increasing contribution to the government’s bottom line, their financial hammer blows are nothing compared to the meteor swarm of challenges that will utterly destroy the governing systems of countries as diverse as China, Korea, Japan, Thailand, Brazil, Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia, and Iran. Meanwhile, American Millennials’ very existence means the United States will at least in part recover from its financial crunch in the 2030s, and probably its labor crunch in the 2040s. But for the rest of the world, it will never get better than it was in the 2010s. Never.
美国人将有少量公司：
The Americans will have a small amount of company:
法国有意识地、持续地努力超越西德，成为世界上最适合家庭的国家之一。瑞典的版本社会民主需要从摇篮到坟墓的家庭支持。新西兰充满了活动空间，并且在过去时代澳大利亚和美国政策的（微弱）阴影下，故意减少本国土著人口的选择，以增加白人的选择。但这三个国家，加上美国，是定义规则的例外。其他所有人的婴儿潮一代都未能生育到接近更替水平的任何水平。六十年后，发达国家的全球千禧一代干部人数太少，甚至在理论上都无法长期保持他们的国籍。
France, in a conscious, sustained effort to outpopulate West Germany, became one of the world’s most family-friendly nations. Sweden’s version of social democracy entails cradle-to-grave family support. New Zealand brims with elbow room, and in a (faint) shadow of Australian and American policy in eras past, deliberately reduced options for its own indigenous population in order to increase options for whites. But these three countries, plus the United States, are the exceptions that define the rule. Everyone else’s Boomers failed to procreate to anything close to replacement levels. Six decades later, the global Millennial cadre of the advanced world is simply too small to even theoretically keep their nationalities in existence over the long haul.
生活在人口统计和统计数据交汇处的人们所做的粗略数学（对我来说这看起来很像微积分）表明人口统计数据从公平到糟糕的地方，如西班牙、英国或澳大利亚，将拖累其每年约占 GDP 2% 的年增长率。德国、意大利、日本、韩国和中国的真正终端人口预计至少减少 4%，而美国和法国的年轻人口只会减少约 1%。再加上仅仅十年，很难想象像德国和中国这样“不可避免的崛起”的地方如何能够生存下来，更不用说发挥作用，更不用说占据主导地位了。
Back-of-the-envelope math done by folks who live in the intersection of demographics and statistics (which looks a lot like calculus to me) suggests that places with fair-to-crappy demographics, like Spain, the United Kingdom, or Australia, will suffer a drag on their annual growth of about 2 percent of GDP annually. The truly terminal demographies of Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, and China are looking at at least 4 percent, while the youngish populations of America and France will only suffer about a 1 percent reduction. Add that up for just a single decade and it is difficult to imagine how the “inevitable rise” of places like Germany and China can even survive, much less function, much less dominate.
最好的是，美国人的更多。
Best yet, there is more to the Americans’ more.
美国更多，第 3 部分：文化
THE AMERICAN MORE, PART 3: CULTURE
美国是世界上四个定居国家之一，这是一个伪技术术语，表明大多数美国人可以将他们的血统追溯到不是来自当前美国领土的人。在 1700 年代和 1800 年代的前端，这些准美国人很年轻。Fogies 和 biddies 不能（也不会）忍受跨越海洋的多周航行所需的那种狭窄条件。这意味着他们到达后 (a) 不太可能死于老年，(b) 更有可能立即开始生很多孩子，(c) 能够扩展到各种开阔的土地，以及 (d) 加强由更多的年轻定居者在接下来船在埃利斯岛排队。它加起来是一个非常年轻、增长非常迅速的人口。当然，这一切都发生在一个多世纪以前，但人口趋势的回响却持续了很长时间。（当代俄罗斯直到现在才收获第一次世界大战和斯大林二战前清洗的糟糕人口收成。）
The United States is one of the world’s four settler states, which is a pseudo-technical term indicating that most Americans can trace their lineage to folks who aren’t from what is currently American territory. On the front end in the 1700s and 1800s, these would-be Americans arrived young. Fogies and biddies couldn’t (and wouldn’t) put up with the sort of cramped conditions required for a multi-week sail across an ocean. That meant that upon arrival they were (a) less likely to die of old age, (b) more likely to immediately start having a lot of kids, (c) able to expand into all kinds of open land, and (d) reinforced by more young settlers in the next ship in the queue at Ellis Island. It added up to a very young, very rapidly growing demographic. Sure, this was all well over a century ago, but the echoes of demographic trends last a long time. (Contemporary Russia is only now reaping the poor demographic harvest of World War I and Stalin’s pre–World War II purges.)
作为一个移民国家，美国往往比其他国家对其政治身份更有信心，对移民也更友好。以至于美国是为数不多的几个甚至公开发布其公民中有多少出生在另一个国家的数据的国家之一。在其他任何地方，即使是收集（更不用说报告）此类数据的过程也介于政治不稳定和叛国之间。这不应该让人感到震惊；除了土着人口，没有美国人实际上来自美国。几十年来，根据美国和全球经济状况以及美国政治文化的波动，向内移民潮起潮落，但通常来说，它在总公民中所占的比例明显高于世界上几乎每个国家。
As a settler state, the United States tends to be far more confident in its political identity as well as friendly to immigration than other countries. To the point that the United States is one of only a very few countries that even publicly publishes data on how many of its citizens were born in another country. Everywhere else, even the process of collecting (much less reporting) such data falls somewhere between politically destabilizing and treasonous. This shouldn’t come as a shock; with the exception of the indigenous population, no Americans are actually from America. Inward migration has ebbed and flowed over the decades based on U.S. and global economic conditions and gyrations within American political culture, but as a rule it is significantly higher than nearly every country in the world as a percentage of the overall citizenry.
这在很大程度上与民族身份的性质有关。大多数国家都是民族国家：其政府的存在是为了在特定领土（国家）中为特定种族（民族）的利益服务。法国人是法国人，日本人是日本人，中国人是中国人，等等。在民族国家中，中央政府往往是政策的首当其冲和最后发言权，因为它知道自己的存在是为了谁的利益服务。这种政府的技术术语是统一的。
In large part it has to do with the nature of national identities. Most countries are nation-states: their governments exist to serve the interests of a specific ethnicity (the nation) in a specific territory (the state). France for the French, Japan for the Japanese, China for the Chinese, and so on. In nation-states the central government tends to be the first and last word as to policy, because it knows whose interests it exists to serve. The technical term for such governments is unitary.
但并非所有政府都是民族国家。有些由居住在不同地域的不同民族组成，每个民族都有自己的地方当局，然而，由于历史、战争、必然和运气的变迁，拼凑出一个共同的行政机构。其结果是一个混合系统，具有不同的、分层的政府——通常是地方、地区和国家——每个政府都有不同的权利、权力和责任。有些国家，如加拿大、巴西、瑞士或波斯尼亚，是非常松散的联合体，以至于它们的国家政府实际上什至名义上都算不上政府：它们是邦联制的。在其他国家，如美国、印度或澳大利亚，各级之间的平衡大致相等：它们是联邦的。*
But not all governments are nation-states. Some are composed of different peoples residing in different geographies who each have their own local authorities, yet, due to the vicissitudes of history, war, necessity, and luck, have cobbled together a common administration. The result is a hybridized system with different, tiered levels of government—typically local, regional, and national—each with different rights, authorities, and responsibilities. Some, like Canada, Brazil, Switzerland, or Bosnia, are such loose associations that their national governments are really barely even governments in name: they are confederal. In others—like the United States, India, or Australia—the balances among the various levels is roughly equal: they are federal.*
从所有这些政治废话中得出的结论是，在美国，联邦政府——总部设在华盛顿特区的政府——显然不是为任何特定种族的利益服务的。甚至批判种族理论的拥护者也完全承认，美国在政治和经济上占主导地位的群体——白种人——本身就是英国人、德国人、爱尔兰人、意大利人、法国人、波兰人、苏格兰人、荷兰人、挪威人、瑞典人、和俄罗斯血统（按此顺序）。
The takeaway from all this political blah-blah-blah is that in the United States the federal government—that’s the one headquartered in Washington, D.C.—was expressly not designed to serve the interest of any specific ethnicity. Even adherents of critical race theory fully admit that the politically and economically dominant group in the United States—white Caucasians—are themselves a blend of peoples of English, German, Irish, Italian, French, Polish, Scottish, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, and Russian descent (in that order).
这种对“美国人”意味着什么的相对宽松的定义使得对于美国来说，具体来说，移民州一般而言，以及最广泛定义的任何联邦或邦联制度，吸收大量新移民要容易得多。在单一体系中，需要邀请新移民加入主流文化。如果做不到这一点，他们就会成为下层阶级。但在美国，新移民通常被允许将自己定义为更广泛社区的成员。
This relatively loose definition of what being “American” means makes it far easier for the United States in specific, the settler states in general, and in the broadest definition any federal or confederal system, to absorb rafts of new immigrants. In unitary systems, new migrants need to be invited to join the dominant culture. Failing that, they become an underclass. But in the United States, new migrants are often allowed to define themselves as members of the broader community.
在未来的世界里，这将是一个非常方便的特性。随着世界消费导向型经济体承担越来越多的自身生产责任并变得越来越孤立，生活在出口导向型系统中的工作年龄成年人根本不会有太多经济机会，更不用说后增长系统了。即使这些疲软的国家幸存下来，它们的工人也将面临选择，要么稳定提高税率以支持其老龄化人口，要么离开。预计世界上剩余的大量劳动力——尤其是高技能劳动力——将很快敲响美国的大门。每一次这样的搬迁，美国相对于其他国家的地位都会提高。
In the world to come that’ll be a helluva handy characteristic. With the world’s consumption-led economies taking responsibility for more and more of their own production and becoming more and more insular, there simply won’t be many economic opportunities for working-age adults living in export-led systems, much less postgrowth systems. Even if such weakening countries survive, their workers will have a choice between steadily higher tax rates to support their aging populations, or leaving. Expect a lot of the world’s remaining labor—especially its high-skilled labor—to soon be knocking on America’s door. With every such relocation, America’s position vis-à-vis everyone else improves.
甚至在移民机制之外，美国人还有最后一张王牌。
And even beyond the mechanics of immigration, the Americans have one final trump card.
美国更多，第 4 部分：墨西哥
THE AMERICAN MORE, PART 4: MEXICO
墨西哥因素的一部分是显而易见的：2021 年，墨西哥人的平均年龄比美国人的平均年龄年轻近 10 岁。作为移民的直接来源，墨西哥人抓住了美国的几个痛处。墨西哥移民压低了美国人的平均年龄，控制了半熟练和非熟练劳动力的成本，并填补了更广泛的人口——尤其是在像南方腹地这样的地区，如果没有墨西哥人的流入，这些地区的人口结构将与美国类似迅速老龄化的意大利。
Part of the Mexico factor is obvious: in 2021 the average Mexican was nearly ten years younger than the average American. As a direct source of migrants, the Mexicans scratch several American itches. Mexican in-migration has held down the average age of Americans, kept semi-and unskilled labor costs under control, and filled out the broader demographic—especially in regions like the Deep South, which without Mexican inflows would suffer a demographic structure similar to that of rapidly aging Italy.
墨西哥因素的一部分是一个不太明显的原因：制造业一体化。墨西哥系统无法为其人民提供电力、教育和基础设施。这不仅压低了墨西哥的工资，但墨西哥的技能组合和墨西哥工人的生产力。任何多阶段制造系统都将具有高度技术性的步骤以及高度非技术性的步骤。熔化铝土矿比挤压铝更容易。将计算机的各个部分组合在一起比编写软件更容易。挖沟比制造铺设在上述沟中的电缆更容易。将任务与技能组合相匹配——也就是劳动分工——能够以最低的成本实现最大的生产。全球化的供应链都是关于利用不同的技能组合和劳动力成本结构来产生最具经济效益的结果。很少有地方像美国和墨西哥那样幸运地拥有完美的技术互补性。
Part of the Mexico factor is a less-than-obvious reason: manufacturing integration. The Mexican system isn’t as capable at providing electricity, education, and infrastructure to its people. This pushes down not only Mexican wages, but Mexican skill sets and Mexican worker productivity. Any multi-stage manufacturing system will have steps that are highly technical as well as those that are highly untechnical. Melting bauxite is easier than extruding aluminum. Snapping together the pieces of a computer is easier than coding software. Trenching ground is easier than manufacturing the cable laid in the aforementioned trench. Matching tasks to skill sets—aka division of labor—enables maximum production at a minimum of costs. Globalized supply chains are all about tapping different skill sets and labor cost structures to generate the most economically efficient outcomes. Few places are as lucky as the United States and Mexico in having the perfect technical complement right next door.
墨西哥因素的一部分完全违反直觉。墨西哥的主要族群起源于西班牙，而美国的主要“族群”是白种人。在墨西哥人看来，这并没有什么不同。西班牙血统的墨西哥人有些看不起土著血统的墨西哥人，他们对中美洲移民的看法与美国人或多或少是一样的。一旦墨西哥人移民到美国，他们就会迅速融入美国。对于第二代墨西哥裔美国人来说，将自己定义为白人是相当普遍的——对于第四代墨西哥裔美国人来说几乎是反身的——. 在他们自己的社会阶层中，墨西哥裔美国人已经将“白人”从一个指代“他们”，尤其是“那些外国佬”的排他性术语重新定义为一个包容性术语，不仅指“我们”，而且指“我们所有人”。
Part of the Mexico factor is downright counterintuitive. The dominant ethnic group in Mexico originates from Spain, while the dominant “ethnic” group in the United States is white Caucasian. In Mexican eyes, that isn’t all that different. Mexicans of Spanish descent somewhat look down on Mexicans of indigenous descent, and they feel more or less the same way about Central American migrants as Americans do. Once Mexicans migrate to the United States, they assimilate quickly. It’s fairly common for second-generation Mexican-Americans—and nearly reflexive for fourth-generation Mexican-Americans—to define themselves as white. Within their own social strata, Mexican-Americans have redefined “white” from an exclusive term that refers to “them” and especially “those gringos” to an inclusive term meaning not simply “us” but “all of us.”
事实证明，美国的同化能力对墨西哥人的影响比对前几波移民的影响更大。在所有情况下，美式英语往往会在两到三代人的时间内淘汰移民的语言。然而，对于墨西哥裔美国人来说，很少需要超过一个。在当代，墨西哥裔美国人是美国梦最热心的追求者，不仅在经济上，而且在文化上。
America’s assimilative capacity has proven to work on Mexicans even better than it has on previous waves of migrants. In all cases, American English tends to rub out the migrants’ language within two to three generations. In the case of Mexican-Americans, however, it rarely takes more than one. In contemporary times, Mexican-Americans are the most enthusiastic seekers of the American Dream, not just economically, but culturally.
当然，这不全是阳光和炸玉米饼。
Of course, it isn’t all sunshine and tacos.
对于移民带来的所有经济、金融和人口优势，文化只能如此迅速地吸收这么多人，在 2010 年代和 2020 年代初期，有时感觉美国已经达到了极限。这不仅仅是一种直觉。看一眼数据就知道为什么：
For all the economic and financial and demographic advantages of in-migration, cultures can only absorb so many so quickly and in the 2010s and early 2020s sometimes it feels as if America has hit its limit. It is more than simply a gut feeling. A peek at the data suggests why:
1970 年代——美国婴儿潮一代成年的十年——美国的移民人数创下了历史相对低点。对于婴儿潮一代——绝大多数是白人——他们在跨种族政治方面的主要经历是民权运动，这场运动涉及的人在婴儿潮一代年轻且政治自由的时候已经在这里了。
In-migration to the United States hit a relative historical low in the 1970s—the decade in which America’s Boomers came of age. For Boomers—an overwhelmingly white demographic—their primary experience with interracial politics was the civil rights movement, a movement that involved people who were already here at a time when the Boomers were young and politically liberal.
然后，移民人数稳步上升，直到在 2010 年代达到接近历史最高水平（同样，相对而言），此时婴儿潮一代即将退休，并因此在政治上变得越来越重要。. . 古板的。在婴儿潮一代变老的每一个十年里，最大的单一移民群体总是墨西哥人。在许多婴儿潮一代的心目中，墨西哥人长期以来不仅仅是“他者”，而是越来越多的“他者” 。如此多的婴儿潮一代如此支持唐纳德特朗普等本土主义政治家的一个重要原因是，他们对美国社会变革速度的震惊并非集体幻觉。它得到了现实的坚定支持。
In-migration then rose steadily until reaching a near-historical high (again, in relative terms) in the 2010s, at which point the Boomers were nearing retirement and in doing so becoming politically . . . stodgy. In each and every decade as the Boomers aged, the largest single immigrant group was always Mexican. In the minds of many Boomers, Mexicans have long been not simply the “other,” but the “other” that has arrived in ever-larger numbers. A big reason why so many Boomers have been so supportive of nativist politicians such as Donald Trump is that their feelings of shock at the pace of change in American society is not a collective hallucination. It is firmly backed up by reality.
这就是为什么美国政治在 2010 年代和 2020 年代初期变得如此孤立的万花筒之一。但不管你对婴儿潮一代、墨西哥人、种族、贸易、同化或边界的看法，有几点需要牢记：
This is one piece of the kaleidoscope of why American politics has turned so sharply insular in the 2010s and early 2020s. But regardless of what you think about Boomers or Mexicans or race or trade or assimilation or borders, there are a couple of thoughts to keep in mind:
首先，墨西哥人已经在美国了。无论您关心的是美国文化的感觉还是劳动力市场的样子，墨西哥浪潮不仅来了，而且已经结束了。墨西哥人向美国的净移民在 2000 年代初达到顶峰，自 2008 年以来的十三年中有十二年为负数. 正如工业化和城市化降低了发达国家的出生率一样，仅仅几十年后，墨西哥也开始了同样的过程。今天的墨西哥人口结构表明，它再也不会成为美国移民的净大规模贡献者。自 2014 年以来流入美国的大部分移民来自中美洲几近崩溃的洪都拉斯、萨尔瓦多和危地马拉。*
First, the Mexicans are already in the United States. Whether you’re concerned with what American culture feels like or what the labor market looks like, the great Mexican wave has not only come, it is over. Net migration of Mexicans to the United States peaked in the early 2000s and it has been negative for twelve of the thirteen years since 2008. Just as industrialization and urbanization pushed down birth rates in the developed world, the same process has begun in Mexico, just a few decades later. Today’s Mexican demographic structure suggests it will never again be a net large-scale contributor to American migration. Most of the big migrant flows into the United States since 2014 have instead been from the near-failed Central American states of Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala.*
其次，即使在美国政治思想中最本土主义的倾向中，也为墨西哥人找到了空间。在短短两年内，唐纳德特朗普从公开谴责墨西哥移民是强奸犯和“坏人”，转而在贸易和安全协议中拥抱墨西哥，使双边关系达到两国历史上最友好和最富有成效的水平。特朗普重新谈判北美自由贸易协定的重要组成部分是明确旨在将制造业带回北美的条款。不是具体针对美国，而是针对协议的任何签署国。特朗普团队在明确考虑墨西哥的情况下添加了这些条款。
Second, even among the most nativist strains of American political thinking, room has been found for Mexicans. In just two years, none other than Donald Trump went from openly condemning Mexican migrants as rapists and “bad hombres” to embracing Mexico in trade and security deals that took bilateral relations to their friendliest and most productive in the history of both republics. Part and parcel of Trump’s renegotiation of the NAFTA accords were clauses that expressly aim to bring manufacturing back to North America. Not to the United States specifically, but to any signatory of the accords. Team Trump added those clauses with Mexico expressly in mind.
另一方面，墨西哥裔美国人正在转向本土主义者。在美国，一直投票反对移民最多的人口不是美国白人，而是（非第一代）墨西哥裔美国人。他们想要家庭团聚，但是只为自己的家人。永远不要忘记，在 2020 年竞选连任时，反移民、筑墙的唐纳德·特朗普几乎控制了南部边境的每个县。
On the other side of the equation, Mexican-Americans are turning nativist. The demographic in the United States that consistently polls the most anti-migration is not white Americans, but instead (non-first-generation) Mexican-Americans. They want family reunification, but only for their own families. Never forget that anti-migrant, build-the-wall Donald Trump carried nearly every county on the southern border when running for reelection in 2020.
第三，美国和墨西哥仍然拥有大多数其他国家所没有的东西：更多。他们肯定有更多的在一起。
Third, America and Mexico still have something most others don’t: more. And they certainly have more more together.
地平线上有一些云。虽然老龄化速度缓慢，但美国人口仍在老龄化。虽然墨西哥人很年轻，但他们的老龄化速度比美国人快。在 2050 年代中期的某个时候，墨西哥人的平均年龄很可能比美国人的平均年龄大。
There are some clouds on the horizon. While it is aging slowly, the American population is still aging. And while Mexicans are young, they are aging faster than Americans. At some point in the mid-2050s, the average Mexican is highly likely to be older than the average American.
但即使在最坏的情况下——从人口统计学角度来看——在我们都陷入混乱的世界中，美国几乎没有其他人拥有的东西：时间。
But even in the worst-case scenario—demographically speaking—the United States has something hardly anyone else has in the world of Disorder we’re all falling into: time.
其他人必须弄清楚如何放松和重新布线他们的系统，在短短几年内设计和实施新主义，而美国人和墨西哥人则有几十年的时间。至少到 2050 年代。大器晚成是有道理的：美国人和他们的墨西哥伙伴将能够放眼世界，从其他人的尝试中学习。
While others must figure out how to unwind and rewire their systems, to design and implement a new -ism in just a few years, the Americans and Mexicans have decades. At least until the 2050s. There is something to be said for being a late bloomer: Americans and their Mexican partners will be able to look across the world and learn from what everyone else tried.
但也许最值得注意的收获不是美国人（与墨西哥人结盟）面临对世界的创伤最小的调整——这很快就会发生，而是世界的未来属于美国。
But perhaps the most notable takeaway isn’t that the Americans (in league with the Mexicans) face the least traumatic adjustment to the world-which-soon-will-be, but instead that the future of the world is American.
数学很简单：美国的人口足够年轻，即使没有墨西哥或向内移民，它的人口也可以保持增长至少几十年。
The math is pretty simple: America’s population is more than young enough that even without Mexico or inward migration, its population can keep growing for at least a few decades.
这是我们所知道的世界末日。. .
IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT . . .
与中国相比。二十年前，中国的人口发展道路走到了尽头。根据你使用的统计数据，中国公民的平均年龄在 2017 年至 2020 年的某个时候超过了美国公民的平均年龄。中国的劳动力和总人口在 2010 年代达到顶峰。在最好的情况下，2070 年中国人口将是不到 2020 年的一半。从中国人口普查机构泄露的最新数据表明，该日期可能需要提前到20-50。中国的崩溃已经开始了。
Compare that to China. China’s population path turned terminal two decades ago. Based on whose statistics you’re using, the average Chinese citizen aged past the average American citizen sometime between 2017 and 2020. China’s labor force and overall population peaked in the 2010s. In the best-case scenario, the Chinese population in the year 2070 will be less than half of what it was in 2020. More recent data that’s leaked out of the Chinese census authority suggests that date may need to be pulled forward to 2050. China’s collapse has already begun.
那个特定的算术甚至没有开始考虑一旦全球化牢牢地出现在后视镜中，全球（和中国）的死亡率水平将会发生什么。世界上大部分地区（包括中国）进口绝大部分能源以及用于种植粮食的投入。世界上大部分地区（包括中国）都依赖贸易来保持其人口不仅富裕和健康，而且还活着。除去这一点，全球（和中国）的死亡率将上升，即使人口趋势表明出生率将继续下降。
That particular bit of arithmetic doesn’t even begin to take into account what will happen to global (and Chinese) mortality levels once globalization is firmly in the rearview mirror. Most of the world (China included) imports the vast majority of its energy as well as the inputs used to grow its food. Most of the world (China included) is dependent upon trade to keep its population not simply wealthy and healthy, but alive. Remove that and global (and Chinese) mortality levels will rise even as baked-in demographic trends mean birth rates will continue to fall.
在世界大部分地区的人口崩溃和美国的人口稳定之间，美国占全球总人口的比例肯定会在接下来的几代人中增加——可能增加一半以上。美国将继续控制全球海洋。美国人将有时间调整他们的系统。世界其他地区可能会为崩溃的经济体系的残骸争吵不休。
Between demographic collapse in much of the world and demographic stability in the United States, America’s share of the total global population is certain to increase within just the next couple of generations—probably by more than half. And America will retain control of the global oceans. And the Americans will have time to adapt their system. And the rest of the world is likely to brawl over the shattered remnants of a collapsed economic system.
在 2022 年撰写本文时，我 48 岁。我不希望在 2050 年代这个新世界完全摆脱困境时完全发挥作用。地平线上的世界会是什么样子，当美国人完全并最终重新参与时世界会是什么样子，将不得不成为另一个时间的项目。相反，本书的目的是展示我们的过渡是什么样子的。我们将要经历的世界将会是怎样的感觉。我们对食物、金钱、燃料、运动和小部件以及我们从地下挖出的东西的了解和理解发生了怎样的变化？成长，重新排列。
At the time of this writing in 2022, I am forty-eight. I don’t expect to be fully functional in the 2050s when this new world fully shakes out. What the world looks like over the horizon, what the world looks like when the Americans fully and finally reengage, is going to have to be a project for another time. Instead, the purpose of this book is to lay out what our transition looks like. What the world we are all going to live through is going to feel like. How do the things we know and understand about food and money and fuel and movement and widgets and the stuff we dig out of the ground change? Grow, rearrange.
失败。
Fail.
所以，考虑到这一点，让我们谈谈世界末日后的生活。
So, with that in mind, let’s talk about life after the end of the world.
作者的简短说明。. . 和莫斯科
A Quick Note from the Author . . . and Moscow
发布时间表有点奇怪。假设您最近暗杀了几位世界主要领导人，或者是奥普拉。每个人都想听听你要说什么。即便如此，从您记下您的想法开始，编辑、文案编辑、校对、印刷和发行的必要性意味着您的书至少需要五个月才能上架。
Publishing schedules are a bit weird. Let’s assume you either recently assassinated a couple major world leaders or are Oprah. Everyone wants to hear what you have to say. Even then, from the point you finish jotting down your thoughts, the necessities of editing, copyediting, proofing, printing, and distribution mean it’ll be at least five months before your book hits the stands.
我不是奥普拉（或刺客），所以我写这本书和你读（或听我读）这些话之间有必要的滞后。我们的制作和编辑团队一直在竭尽全力让这本书尽快出版，但在某些方面我们失败了。我们于 2022 年 2 月 16 日提交了这本手稿的最终定稿。俄罗斯在不到两周后发动了对乌克兰的全面入侵，而这本书要到 6 月 14 日才会发布。
I’m no Oprah (or assassin), so there is a necessary lag between my writing of this book and your reading (or listening to me read) these words. Our production and editorial teams have been racing nothing less than the return of history to get this book out as soon as possible, but as I’m sure you are aware, in some respects we’ve failed. We submitted the final final final version of this manuscript on February 16, 2022. Russia launched a full invasion of Ukraine less than two weeks later, and this book will not be released until June 14.
在 2022 年 2 月 28 日写这篇笔记和你摄取这些文字之间，完全有可能会有其他重大中断。我非常密切地关注着中国共产党主席习近平的个人崇拜可能会崩溃。但这种持续的破坏与其说是一个错误，不如说是我们已经进入的世界的一个特征。使历史停滞不前的拖延行为已经消失，我们都在快速地进入下一个时代。
It is entirely possible there will be additional major disruptions between the writing of this note on February 28, 2022, and when you ingest these words. I’m eyeing the potential collapse of Chinese Communist Party Chairman Xi Jinping’s cult of personality very closely. But such ongoing disruptions are less a bug and more a feature of the world we are already devolving into. The delaying actions that have kept history stuck are gone, and we are all advancing—rapidly—into the next age.
祝我们大家好运。
Best of luck to us all.
漫漫长路
The Long, Long Road
让我们从泡菜玉米饼开始吧。
Let’s start with kimchi quesadillas.
我是融合食品的忠实粉丝。酸辣培根。早餐披萨。辣酱面条。焦糖芝士蛋糕馄饨。菠萝汉堡。奶油布丁巴甫洛娃。黄油鸭普丁。带来。它。在！
I’m a big fan of fusion food. Hot-and-sour bacon. Breakfast pizza. Enchilasagna. Caramel cheesecake wontons. Pineapple burgers. Crème brûlée pavlova. Butter duck poutine. Bring. It. On!
现在，这可能会让人感到意外，但您不能只是去杂货店从冷冻室购买现成的寿司玉米卷。（很难过。）你能做的就是购买玉米粥粉，面粉，喜马拉雅盐，青花椒，鼻甲糖，纸箱无胆固醇鸡蛋，寿司级金枪鱼，米醋，温室黄瓜，烟熏三文鱼，芥末，蛋黄酱、紫菜片、多色胡萝卜、生姜、味噌酱、酱油、芝麻和红花油。
Now, this may come as a surprise, but you can’t just go to a grocery store and purchase a ready-made sushi corndog dish from the freezer section. (Very sad.) What you can do is purchase ground polenta, flour, Himalayan salt, green peppercorns, turbinado sugar, cholesterol-free eggs in a carton, sushi-grade tuna, rice vinegar, hothouse cucumbers, smoked salmon, wasabi, mayo, nori sheets, multicolor carrots, ginger, miso paste, soy sauce, sesame seeds, and safflower oil.
今天的杂货店平均有大约四万件商品，而在二十世纪初只有大约两百件。这家简陋的杂货店是一个技术奇迹，它使我能够随时随地从任何地方采购我需要的几乎任何东西，只要我觉得有必要尝试一些新的疯狂美食组合。*瑞典语？泰国？摩洛哥？过季？没问题。这些投入品几乎从不缺货，而且几乎总是可以以不会让人望而却步的价格买到。这不仅仅是可用性和低成本；它具有可靠的可用性和可靠的低成本。
The average grocery store today has about forty thousand individual items, up from about two hundred at the dawn of the twentieth century. The humble grocery is a technological miracle that enables me to source nearly anything I need from anywhere, anytime I feel the need to experiment with some new wild-ass crazy cuisine combo.* Swedish? Thai? Moroccan? Out of season? No problem. The inputs are hardly ever out of stock, and are almost always available at prices that are not prohibitive. It isn’t simply availability and low cost; it’s reliable availability and reliably low cost.
将这种完全可用性的概念应用到所有事物中，您现在就可以对支撑现代全球化经济的绝对连通性有一丝了解。当今工业和消费品的成分之所以可用，是因为它们可以从——字面意思——中途转移以低成本、高速度和完美的安全性在世界各地。电话、肥料、油、樱桃、丙烯、纯麦芽威士忌。. . 你的名字，它在运动。全部。这。时间。交通是最终的推动力。
Take this concept of utter availability, apply it to absolutely everything, and you now have a glimmer of the absolute connectivity that underpins the modern, globalized economy. The ingredients of today’s industrial and consumer goods are only available because they can be moved from—literally—halfway around the world at low costs and high speeds and in perfect security. Phones, fertilizers, oil, cherries, propylene, single-malt whiskey . . . you name it, it is in motion. All. The. Time. Transportation is the ultimate enabler.
大多数技术并没有从根本上改变我们。想想当代的智能手机。它集手电筒、音乐播放器、相机、游戏机、票价卡、遥控器、图书馆、电视机、食谱、电脑于一身。它并没有使我们能够做很多从根本上来说是新的事情，但它已经将十多种预先存在的设备合二为一，提高了效率和访问权限。重要的？可笑。但这种基于改进的技术并没有从根本上改变我们是谁。
Most technologies do not fundamentally change us. Consider the contemporary smartphone. It’s a flashlight, a music player, a camera, a game console, a fare card, a remote control, a library, a television, a cookbook, a computer—all in one. It hasn’t enabled us to do much that’s fundamentally new, but it has combined more than a dozen preexisting devices into one, increasing efficiency and access. Important? Ridiculously. But such improvement-based techs do not fundamentally change who we are.
另一方面，交通技术深刻地改变了我们与地理的关系。今天，您可以在几个小时内跨越大陆。并非总是这样。事实上，几乎从来都不是这样。直到几百年前，我们中的任何一个人都很少在离家几英里以外的地方冒险。六千年的人类历史确实是沿着漫长的道路缓慢而痛苦地爬行。
Transport technologies, on the other hand, profoundly alter our relationship with our geography. Today you can jump continents in a few hours. It wasn’t always this way. In fact, it was almost never this way. Until a couple hundred years ago, it was rare for any of us to venture more than a few miles from home. The six millennia of human history has quite literally been a slow, agonizing crawl along a long, long road.
了解我们如何从 A 地旅行到 B 地的演变和革命，了解使我们的现代杂货店和智能手机成为可能的连通性，您就会了解为什么我们的世界会变成现在这样。
Understand the evolutions and revolutions in how we’ve traveled from A to B, understand the connectivity that has made our modern grocery stores and smartphones possible, and you can understand why our world is shaped the way it is.
未来几十年将为我们所有人带来什么样的奇迹和恐怖。
And what wonders and terrors the coming decades will hold for us all.
运输物理学的痛苦
THE AGONY OF THE PHYSICS OF TRANSPORT
人体是一种脆弱而低效的货物运输方式。
The human body is a frail and ridiculously inefficient form of transporting goods.
想象一下，从我们作为智人首次出现到大约 1700 年代中期，你是任何一个随机的人。不幸的是，您的双腿可能是您唯一的交通工具。直到大约公元 100 年，手推车才成为一个大问题。直到几个世纪之后，手推车对普通农民来说太贵了，即使有路可以拖他们在。即使是等待像自行车这样老式的东西，也会让你一直玩弄拇指，直到 18 世纪末（如果你想要踏板，则为 19 世纪中叶）。即使在今天，贸易商仍然使用骆驼是有充分理由的。
Imagine you are any random human from the time of our first emergence as Homo sapiens to about the mid-1700s. Unfortunately for you, your legs are likely your only means of transportation. Wheelbarrows did not become a big deal until about 100 CE. Carts were too expensive for the average peasant until centuries later, even if there were roads to drag them upon. Even waiting around for something as old-school as a bicycle would have kept you twiddling your thumbs until the late eighteenth century (mid-nineteenth if you wanted pedals). There are good reasons traders still use camels even today.
对于大多数人来说，你的生活、你的城镇和你的生计都受到你愿意背着沉重的负担一天走多远的限制。
For most people, your life, your town, and your livelihood were circumscribed by how far you were willing to walk in a day with a crushing load on your back.
这使城镇变小了。在工业技术重塑世界之前，“城市”地区需要每个居民近半英亩的农田来防止饥饿——是我们今天使用的土地的七倍多，另外还有一百倍的林地面积用于生产木炭来做饭和看人口过冬。它使城市保持小规模。长得太大，或者 a) 食物必须来自太远的地方（换句话说，你会饿死），或者 b) 你砍伐森林以在当地种植更多的食物，而当今的尖端技术——火——被拒绝了你（你饿死的同时也冻死了）。
That kept towns small. Before industrial techs remade the world, “urban” areas required nearly a half an acre of farmland per resident to prevent starvation—over seven times the land we use today, plus another one hundred times as much area in forestland to produce charcoal to cook and see the population through the winter. It made cities stay small. Grow too big and either a) food must come from too far away (in other words, you starve), or b) you cut down your forests to grow more food locally and the cutting-edge technology of the day—fire—is denied you (you starve while also freezing to death).
车轮有所帮助，但没有您想象的那么大。我相信你们都听说过罗马著名的道路是前现代时代最伟大的成就之一。几个观点：
Wheels helped, but not as much as you might think. I’m sure you’ve all heard about Rome’s famous roads being one of the greatest achievements of the premodern age. A few points of perspective:
罗马的道路从格拉斯哥延伸到马拉喀什，再到巴格达，再到敖德萨，总长度与现代道路大致相当。. . 缅因州。罗马的公路网花了六个世纪——十亿个劳动日——才建成，更不用说维护了。
Rome’s roads stretched from Glasgow to Marrakech to Baghdad to Odessa, and were roughly equivalent in total length to the roads of modern-day . . . Maine. The Roman road network took six centuries—one billion labor-days—to construct, to say nothing of maintenance.
“贸易”这个概念本身就很可疑。你不能提前打电话看看下一个城镇是否真的需要你卖的东西。. . 然后是变质的问题。除了最有价值的物品，你根本无法携带足够的食物来进行长途贸易。
The very concept of “trade” was dubious. You couldn’t call ahead to see if the next town over actually needed what you had to sell . . . and then there’s the problem of spoilage. You simply couldn’t carry enough food to make long-distance trade viable for anything but the most valuable items.
混凝土和沥青、化学防腐剂和制冷只是 1800 年代才出现的讨厌的工业时代技术中的一小部分。高效、定期的大宗货物陆路运输，即使是相对较短的距离，在整个人类历史上不仅困难重重，而且在经济上也是不可能的。
Concrete and asphalt, chemical preservatives and refrigeration are only a few of those pesky industrial-era technologies that didn’t come around until the 1800s. Efficient, regular overland transport for bulk goods, even over relatively short distances, was not just difficult but also economically impossible for just about all of human history.
甚至粮仓也不能可靠地养活自己。1500 年至 1778 年间，法国经历了数次全国性饥荒（以及数十次地区性饥荒）。是的，那个法国——一个千年前一直是欧洲最大和最可靠的粮食生产国的国家，这个拥有三个独立农业区的国家，这个拥有前工业化世界最好的内部运输系统的国家，无一例外。
Even breadbaskets could not reliably feed themselves. Between 1500 and 1778, France suffered several national famines (and dozens of regional famines). Yes, that France—the country that has been Europe’s largest and most reliable food producer stretching back a millennium, the country that has three SEPARATE agricultural regions, the country that had, bar none, the best internal transport system of the preindustrial world.
陆路搬东西很烂。
Moving things overland sucks.
所以我们想出了如何以不同的方式移动东西。我们想出了如何漂浮。
So we figured out how to move stuff a different way. We figured out how to float.
虽然骆驼可以移动四分之一吨，牛车可以移动一吨左右，但即使是最早的散货船也可以移动数百吨价格的一小部分。众所周知，罗马人从埃及进口其首都的大部分食物。还记得那些比世界一流的罗马公路吗？在公元 300 年，在这些道路上运送谷物 70 英里的成本比从埃及航行约 1,400 英里到罗马的成本还要高。水运经济是如此不平衡，以至于一些文化（见：政府；荷兰人、阿兹特克人、中国人）将围绕动员劳动力的能力重新安排他们的整个管理系统，以开辟绵延数百英里的运河，穿过多岩石、起伏不定的景观，仅需不到石镐。一切都是为了将人类交通技术的巅峰之作漂浮到公元第二个千年：低矮的驳船。
While a camel could move a quarter ton and ox-drawn carts around a ton, even the earliest bulk ships could move several hundred tons at a fraction of the price per ton. The Romans famously imported most of their capital’s food from Egypt. Remember those better-than-world-class Roman roads? In 300 CE it cost more to move grain 70 miles on those roads than it did to sail it some 1,400 miles from Egypt to Rome. The economics of water transport were so lopsided that some cultures (see: government; Dutch, Aztec, Chinese) would rearrange their entire governing systems around the capacity to mobilize labor to dig canals stretching hundreds of miles through rocky, undulating landscapes with little more than stone picks. All to float what was the pinnacle of human transport technology well into the second millennium CE: the lowly barge.
到十四世纪，历史终于开始加速：帆和钉子、桨和舵、货舱和甲板、枪支和大炮、罗盘和星盘。和疯狂。不要忽视疯狂的自由注入。西方发现巨大季风的传说是由一些希腊疯子发现的，他愿意航行到大洋中央，却不知道接下来会发生什么。综上所述，更新、更大、更坚固、更快、装备更精良的船只在 15 世纪末将我们带入了深水时代。
By the fourteenth century, history finally started picking up speed: Sails and nails, oars and rudders, holds and decks, guns and artillery, compasses and astrolabes. And crazy. Don’t neglect a liberal infusion of crazy. The fabled Western discovery of the great monsoon winds was made by some Greek maniac willing to sail to the middle of the ocean with no idea what would happen next. Take it all together, and newer, larger, sturdier, faster, better-armed ships brought us into the deepwater age at the end of the fifteenth century.
当然，这是从工业革命的另一端来看待它的舒适方式。
Of course, that’s the comfortable way to look at it from the far side of the Industrial Revolution.
深水时代的运输：更好、更快、更便宜、更安全。. . 但不够好、不够快、不够便宜或不够安全
TRANSPORT IN THE DEEPWATER AGE: BETTER, FASTER, CHEAPER, SAFER . . . BUT NOT GOOD, FAST, CHEAP, OR SAFE ENOUGH
仅仅因为人类现在可以远距离运送货物并不意味着我们经常这样做。
Just because humanity now could ship goods long distances didn’t mean we did so very often.
从波罗的海地区到西欧大陆的谷物运输是后深水但工业化前的事情，这并不是一件经常发生的事情。即使英荷争端没有影响交付，即使瑞典人没有在您的船上全力以赴，即使波兰立陶宛联邦度过了难得的好日子，最终产品成本的一半通常仍在来自运输，另外四分之一是存储费。在内地生产的谷物，无论土地多产，都倾向于留在那里。到 1700 年代后期，美国殖民者兼独立的美国人确实运送了一些谷物横跨大西洋，但这几乎不是稳定的流动。没有什么比进行为期六周的艰苦旅行却发现英格兰获得丰收更令人沮丧的了。
Post-deepwater but preindustrial shipments of grain from the Baltic region to continental Western Europe were hardly a regular affair. Even if Anglo-Dutch disputes didn’t cut into deliveries, even if the Swedes didn’t go all Viking on your ships, even if the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was having a rare good day, half of the end-product cost typically still came from transport, with another quarter being racked up as storage fees. Grains produced in the interior, no matter how productive the land, tended to stay there. By the late 1700s the American colonists–cum–independent Americans did ship some grains across the Atlantic, but it was hardly a steady flow. Few things sucked more than making the grueling, six-week trip only to discover that England had had a bumper harvest.
然而，即使船舶变得更有效率，技术和地缘政治的交集仍然让世界分裂。
Yet even as ships became more efficient, the intersection of technology and geopolitics left the world divided.
地缘政治要求任何帝国都不得从任何其他帝国购买食物。即使在航运被认为可靠的极少数情况下，反对君主的情绪和胃口也肯定是不可靠的。地缘政治要求食品运输很少值得成本或风险。但是玉石、胡椒、桂皮、瓷器、丝绸和烟草呢？手提包！大多数奢侈品都不易腐烂，这一点（有很大帮助）。茶几乎是一种低调的产品，可以可靠地切入市场。*
Geopolitics demanded that no empire buy food from any other. Even in the rare cases when shipping was thought reliable, the moods and appetites of opposing monarchs were most assuredly not. Geopolitics demanded that food shipments were rarely worth either the cost or the risk. But jade, pepper, cinnamon, porcelain, silk, and tobacco? Totes! It helped (a lot) that most luxury goods were not perishable. Tea was about as lowbrow a product there was to reliably make the cut.*
由于距离遥远，奢侈品“贸易”仅被视为“全球”涉及。实际上，帝国之间几乎没有贸易。更准确地说，这是一系列共享极少接触点的封闭系统，而且接触点不稳定。货物仅限于真正有价值的东西，以及那些你最终可以没有的东西。当您确实看到一艘越洋货船时，可以肯定的是，扰乱它的一天就会成为您的一天。西班牙人称这种破坏者为“英国人”。英国人称这种破坏者为“法国人”。今天，我们称此类破坏者为“海盗”。*
The luxuries “trade” was only considered “global” because of the distances involved. In reality, there was little trade among the empires. It was more accurately a series of closed systems sharing very few points of contact, and erratic contact at that. Cargoes were limited to the truly valuable, and to the sort of things you could ultimately do without. When you did see a transoceanic cargo vessel, it was a solid bet that disrupting its day would make yours. The Spanish called such disruptors “English.” The British called such disruptors “French.” Today we call such disruptors “pirates.”*
由于这种故意断开连接的结果，邻居们更少地进行交易，而更多地向其发射炮弹。“文明”世界*存在于近乎永久的竞争状态。给这样的混乱带来秩序是根本不可能的。当时的超级海军力量——17 世纪和 18 世纪初的西班牙人或 18 世纪末和 19 世纪的英国人——会试图让每个人相信他们是强大的和负责的，但这是在雷达和巡航时代之前导弹。有很多海洋可供巡逻。竞争对手有令人信服的战略和经济理由来搞砸事情。任何“命令”都只会在他们的军舰视线范围内。
As a result of this deliberate disconnectedness, neighbors were less for trading with and more for launching artillery shells into. The “civilized” world* existed in a state of near-permanent competition. Bringing order to such chaos was simply impossible. The superior naval power of the day—the Spanish in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries or the English in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—would attempt to convince everyone they were large and in charge, but this was before the age of radar and cruise missiles. There was a lot of ocean to patrol. Rivals had compelling strategic and economic reasons to muck things up. Any “order” would only hold within sight of their military vessels.
早期工业时代的新技术——后纺织、前钢铁船舶——在某种程度上扩大了可以经济运输的货物范围，这反过来又为新的国家开辟了空间：中介或运送货物的中间商在对立的帝国之间。这是冒险的事情。一个帝国在周一归类为“经纪”的交易往往在周四被重新归类为“双重交易”。荷兰人——每个欧洲人最喜欢的中间人——因其在进行欧洲贸易时的巨大繁荣而臭名昭著，而当英国人、法国人或德国人认为他们已经受够了荷兰人与另一方的贸易时，他们又会大萧条。
The new technologies of the early industrial era—post-textiles, pre–steel ships—somewhat widened the range of goods that could be transported economically, which in turn carved out room for a new tier of country: the middlemen who brokered or ferried goods among opposing empires. It was risky business. The deals an empire categorized as “brokering” on Monday were often reclassified as “double dealing” by Thursday. The Dutch—every European’s favorite middleman—became notorious for their massive booms when they carried European trade, and massive busts when the British or French or Germans decided they had had enough of the Dutch trading with the other side.
美国人很早就吸取了这个教训，而且经常吸取教训。这个年轻国家早期的许多地缘政治噩梦都集中在明显属于荷兰品种的贸易上。
The Americans learned this lesson early and often. Many of the early geopolitical nightmares for the young country centered on trade of the decidedly Dutch variety.
- 美国的第一场重大战略争端，即 1798 年至 1800 年的准战争，主要集中在法国夺取“中立的”美国运往英国的航运。英国人为即将到来的战斗准备了一些爆米花，还好意思向最近独立的美国人谈论法国的狗屎，但当双方让步时，他们最终感到失望。
- America’s first major strategic row, the Quasi War of 1798–1800, centered on French seizures of “neutral” American shipping to Britain. The Brits made some popcorn for the coming fight and had the nerve to talk shit about France to the recently independent Americans, but they were ultimately disappointed when both sides backed down.
- 仅仅 12 年后，美国人又发现自己身处法英战争之中（如果算上美国革命，这是他们的第三次战争*）。这一次，法国由拿破仑统治。英国人特别积极地拦截他们认为破坏封锁的美国船只，甚至让悬挂美国国旗的船只上的船员进入皇家海军。* Yadda yadda，事情发生了，事情说了，扳机被扣了，火把被扔了，在你意识到之前，英国人在前白宫的煤上烤棉花糖，加拿大人永远不确定他们能信任多少美国佬。
- Just twelve years later, the Americans found themselves again in the middle of a French-British war (their third if you include the American Revolution*). This time around, France was run by Napoleon. The British were particularly aggressive in interdicting American ships they deemed blockade breakers, even impressing crews on American flagged ships into the Royal Navy.* Yadda yadda, stuff happened, things were said, triggers were pulled, torches were thrown, before you knew it the Brits were roasting marshmallows over the coals of the former White House, and the Canadians became forever unsure just how much they could trust the Yanks.
然而，然而，然而，这是惊人的——令人震惊的——有多少没有改变。
And yet and yet and yet, it was stunning—shocking—how much did not change.
在前工业时代结束时，大多数经济体要么自给自足，要么以某种方式被征服，拥有通航河流或安全海岸的城市在很大程度上占据主导地位。几个世纪以来，虽然海外旅行的经济和技术有了显着改善，但陆路旅行只是偶尔有所改善。
At the close of the preindustrial era, most economies were still either self-contained or subjugated in one way or another, with the cities that enjoyed navigable rivers or safe coasts largely dominating. For while the economics and mechanics of overseas travel had improved remarkably over the centuries, overland travel had only seen occasional improvements.
并不是说一切都变得更好了。马的繁育、富养、驯养等方面取得了稳步进展。每一点触及范围都意味着更多地获得电力行业的资源，或者进入可以与外界进行贸易的新城镇。但不像1820 年，水路交通和陆路交通有了千倍的改善，看起来与罗马人的情况非常相似，只是在许多情况下，道路更糟。即使像俄勒冈小道的时间一样“最近”，如果您的牛车每天能行驶 15 英里，您也不会高兴，反而会兴奋不已。虽然马蹄铁和钢轴等技术的进步确实为未来的发展奠定了重要的基础，但这些技术并没有从根本上改变我们移动自己或移动东西的方式。
It wasn’t that nothing had gotten better. There had been steady advances in horse breeding, nutrient-rich-feeding, harnessing, and so on. Every bit of reach meant more access to resources to power industry, or access to new towns that could trade with the outside world. But unlike the thousandfold improvements in movement by water, movement by land in 1820 looked an awful lot like it did for the Romans, just with, in many cases, worse roads. Even as “recently” as the time of the Oregon Trail, you would not be happy, but instead thrilled should your ox-drawn cart manage to clock fifteen miles a day. While the technological advances in things like horseshoes and steel axles did lay important groundwork for what would come, these technologies didn’t fundamentally change how we moved either ourselves or our stuff.
他们做不到。他们不会。也就是说，直到一个全新的技术套件沸腾并改变了一切。
And they couldn’t. And they wouldn’t. That is, until such time that a completely new technological suite boiled forth and changed everything.
挣脱束缚
Breaking Free
运输工业化
Industrializing Transport
在早期工业时代，伦敦与大多数主要的早期工业城市一样，其发展已经超出了采伐木材生产木炭的能力。森林砍伐推高了木材价格，提高了替代品煤炭的经济性。越来越高的煤炭需求导致越来越深的煤矿。
In the early industrial era, London, like most major early industrial cities, had grown beyond its ability to harvest timber for charcoal. Deforestation drove up the price of wood, improving the economics of the alternative: coal. Ever-higher coal demand led to ever-deeper coal mines.
那些更深的地雷冲到地下水位以下，需要水泵抽水。肌肉根本无法清理该死的地下水位，所以蒸汽机应运而生来解决这个问题。它工作了一段时间，但是新的蒸汽机需要动力，而动力来自煤炭，而煤炭来自越来越深的井，里面装满了越来越多的水，所以矿工们并没有真正解决他们的问题，而是将其工业化规模。
Those deeper mines punched below the water table, necessitating pumps to force out water. Muscle didn’t work at all to clear out the freakin’ water table, so steam engines came into being to address the problem. It worked for a bit, but the new steam engines required power and that power came from coal and that coal came from ever-deeper shafts that filled with ever-more water, so miners hadn’t really solved their problem, but instead industrialized its scale.
面对越来越深的竖井和越来越昂贵的蒸汽机的成本，一些供应商冒险到更远的地方从与伦敦不直接相邻的煤层采购煤炭。该修复需要自己的扩建：运河和船只将黑色物质运回 Merry Ol' London。很快，英国一半的私人船只被用来运送煤炭，从而产生了价格上涨的问题。
Faced with the cost of ever-deeper shafts and ever-more-expensive steam engines, some suppliers ventured farther afield to source coal from seams that were not directly adjacent to London. That fix required its own buildout: canals and boats to transport the black stuff back to Merry Ol’ London. Soon half of Britain’s private boats were used to move coal, generating its own inflationary price issue.
推动考虑其他选择，一些有进取心的煤炭供应商将更新、更强大的蒸汽机与用于矿井内手推车运输的轨道与一种只有煤炭才能熔炼的金属结合起来：钢。砰！铁路。
Nudged to consider other options, some enterprising coal suppliers combined the newer, more powerful steam engines with the rails used for cart transport within the mines, with a metal that only coal could smelt: steel. Bam! Railways.
铁路是充满活力的能量。将人类送上月球是件很酷的事，但人类迄今为止最伟大的把戏是制造机器，将谷物从超过 50 英里的内陆运到水里。这样做的同时还能盈利！在水上运输东西仍然更便宜，但可以建造一条铁路线到任何平坦和运输东西的地方通过铁路“仅”是船舶运营成本的两倍。与铁路前陆运成本的 20 倍以上相比，只需支付双倍费用是一场真正的革命。世界上最多产的农田，我们至今所依赖的不仅是维持现代社会运转，而且确实是为了让每个人都活着，现在可以开门营业了。在欧洲，从马车到铁路的转变将内部运输成本降低了八分之一，使各种名词能够以经济上可持续的价格快速聚集，无论这些名词是食品、煤炭、铁矿石还是士兵.
Railroads were energy made animate. Getting man to the moon was cool and all, but humanity’s greatest trick to date is building machines to get grain from more than fifty miles inland to the water. And to do so while still making a profit! Moving stuff on water remained cheaper, but a rail line could be built to anywhere that was flat and transporting stuff via rail was “only” twice the cost to operate of a ship. Compared to the >20 times the cost for pre-rail land transport, only having to pay double was a true revolution. The most prolific agricultural lands in the world, the ones that we rely on to this day not simply to keep modern society in motion but to quite literally keep everybody alive, could now be opened for business. In Europe, the shift from carriage to rail reduced the cost of internal transport by a factor of eight, enabling the rapid massing of nouns of all kinds at economically sustainable prices, whether the nouns in question be foodstuffs, coal, iron ore, or soldiers.
俄罗斯提供了一个很好的例子，说明这是多么具有变革性。
Russia provides an excellent example of how transformative this can be.
俄罗斯南部的大部分领土是一个被称为草原的气候区：炎热的夏季，寒冷的冬季，以及非常令人沮丧的平坦和无聊。降水变化无常，但在多雨的年份，农业增长可能呈爆炸式增长。问题是把谷物拿出来。俄罗斯有哪些可通航的河流不流经或流向有用的地方，其中大部分河流终止于北极。
Much of southern Russian territory is a climate zone known as steppe: hot summers, cold winters, and so very demoralizingly flat and boring. Precipitation is fickle, but in a wet year agricultural growth can be explosive. The problem is getting the grain out. What navigable rivers Russia has don’t flow through or to useful places, with most terminating in the Arctic.
马匹和马车拖着数千吨粮食穿越广阔的俄罗斯开阔地带，在任何时代都太过劳累而无利可图。发生的少量交易符合正常要求：相对于重量的高价值；想想昂贵的布料和贵金属。在大草原的开放和雨后繁荣-萧条的经济周期之间，骑着马的蒙古人毫不费力地征服了整个地区并坚守了三个世纪也就不足为奇了。. . 同时通过向丝绸之路的北部分支征税来过上富裕的生活。
Horses and carriages dragging thousands of tons of grain over the great Russian wide-open is far too taxing to be profitable in any era. What little trade occurred fit the normal bill: high value relative to weight; think pricy cloths and precious metals. Between the steppe’s openness and the boom-bust economic cycle that followed the rain, it should come as no surprise that the horse-mounted Mongolians had no problem conquering the whole region and holding it for three centuries . . . while making a bang-up living taxing the northern branches of the Silk Roads.
无论如何，高昂的内部运输成本意味着后蒙古帝国俄罗斯想要出口的任何产品都必须在港口附近采购。截至 18 世纪，大约 70% 的俄罗斯谷物出口并非产自帝国较为肥沃的地区，而是产自俄罗斯的波罗的海省份爱沙尼亚和利沃尼亚*，因为它们靠近里加港。俄罗斯内陆农田，无论多产，基本上都与俄罗斯市场隔绝，更不用说世界市场了。
In any case, high internal transport costs meant that any products that post-Mongol, Imperial Russia wished to export had to be sourced close to ports. As of the eighteenth century, some 70 percent of Russian grain exports were not grown in the empire’s more fertile regions, but instead in Russia’s Baltic provinces of Estonia and Livonia* by virtue of their proximity to the port of Riga. Inland Russian farmland, no matter how productive, was essentially cut off from the Russian market, never mind the world market.
改变这个需要两件事：
Changing this required two things:
首先，19世纪中叶，叶卡捷琳娜大帝将俄罗斯版图扩展至黑海，首次授予俄罗斯温水港通道。不仅这片土地的大部分位于今天乌克兰的肥沃地带，而且黑海也靠近高加索以北的俄罗斯自己的黑土地区（臭名昭着的草原地区）。
First, in the mid-nineteenth century, Catherine the Great expanded Russian territory to the Black Sea, granting Russia warm-water port access for the first time. Not only was much of this land in the fertile zones of what is today Ukraine, but the Black Sea is also proximate to Russia’s own Black Earth region north of the Caucasus (a zone in that infamous steppe).
其次，在 1853-56 年的克里米亚战争中，几个工业化的欧洲国家并没有简单地击败，而是实际上彻底羞辱了基本上没有工业化的俄罗斯军队。为了防止这样的灾难再次发生，亚历山大二世领导下的俄罗斯第一次真正努力实现工业化。考虑到俄罗斯幅员辽阔，即使在帝国人口较多的领土内运输货物也有多么困难，因此建设铁路网成为当务之急。
Second, in the 1853–56 Crimean War, several industrializing European countries did not simply defeat but in fact thoroughly humiliated the largely unindustrialized Russian army. In an effort to prevent such a catastrophe from reoccurring, Russia under Alexander II made its first real efforts to industrialize. Considering how physically huge Russia is and how difficult it was to transport goods even within the empire’s more populous territories, building a railroad network was at the top of the to-do list.
突然之间，俄罗斯谷物可以进入国际市场。男孩，做到了！俄罗斯的铁路计划于 1866 年正式启动。在短短 15 年内，俄罗斯网络大约翻了两番，达到近 15,000 英里，增加的轨道数量超过了前半个世纪整个欧洲的轨道数量。在同一窗口期间，俄罗斯的谷物出口以几乎相同的速度增长，达到 4,200 公吨。在这种情况下，相关性就是因果关系。
Suddenly Russian grain could reach international markets. And boy, did it! The Russian rail program began in earnest in 1866. In just fifteen years the Russian network roughly quadrupled to nearly 15,000 miles, adding more track than all of Europe had during the previous half century. During the same window, Russia’s grain exports increased at nearly the same rate, to 4,200 metric tons. In this case, correlation is causation.
工业革命也发生在水运方面。由于几个半显而易见的技术原因，它只花了一点时间。
The Industrial Revolution came for water transport as well. It just took a bit longer, for a couple of semi-obvious technical reasons.
首先，蒸汽机早在钢铁大量供应之前就已经发明了。早期的轮船还是木头做的。蒸汽机靠煤运行。煤在 3,000 度以上燃烧。不需要化学博士学位也能理解其中的复杂性。
First, the steam engine was invented well before steel became available in large quantities. The early steamships were still made of wood. Steam engines ran on coal. Coal burns at over 3,000 degrees. It doesn’t take a doctorate in chemistry to understand the complication.
其次，煤燃烧后就消失了，而风却永远存在（如果你正确地计划了你的旅程）。在离家太远的地方用煤做蒸汽会使船变成昂贵的木筏。大英帝国早期工业时代的大部分后勤需求都围绕着建立和保护偏远的加煤站，如曼德海峡的亚丁和佩里姆、东南亚的香港和新加坡、中部的范宁岛和斐济太平洋，西南太平洋的澳大利亚和新西兰，印度洋的迪戈加西亚，加拿大的哈利法克斯，大西洋中部的百慕大，地中海的直布罗陀和马耳他。英国人乘风破浪，但建立帝国仍然需要时间和精力。技术需求塑造了帝国，反之亦然。
Second, coal burns and then it is gone, while the wind is forever (if you plan your journey correctly). Steaming by coal too far from home turns a ship into an expensive raft. Much of the early Industrial Age logistical needs of the British Empire revolved around the establishment and protection of far-flung coaling stations like Aden and Perim on the Bab el-Mandeb, Hong Kong and Singapore in Southeast Asia, Fanning Island and Fiji in the central Pacific, Australia and New Zealand in the southwest Pacific, Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, Halifax in Canada, Bermuda in the central Atlantic, and Gibraltar and Malta in the Mediterranean. The Brits were pretty fly on the waves, but building an empire still takes time and effort. Technological requirements shaped the empire as much as the other way around.
尽管如此，关于必要性和母亲的说法仍然适用，每个人和他们的女性祖先都感到需要速度。
Still, the saying about necessity and mothers held true, and everyone and their female forebears felt the need for speed.
早期的轮船可以以每小时 5-8 英里的速度移动大约 1,000 吨，对于懒惰的自行车骑行来说这是一个合理的速度。* 1840 年代为我们带来了螺旋式电机（想想螺旋桨而不是桨轮）和更快的速度。钢制船体于 1860 年代首次亮相，在很大程度上解决了“不要烧船”的问题，以及许多其他限速问题，例如船体污垢。到 1890 年代，这些技术以及更多技术在其背后经历了几代扭结试验，为更大、更快的船只奠定了基础。到 1914 年，一些全钢商船以每小时 12-15 英里的令人印象深刻且可靠的速度航行。再加上苏伊士运河和巴拿马运河（分别是 1869 年和 1914 年），货物可以无需完全环绕各大洲即可到达更多地点。更多的轰动，更少的降压。
Early steamships could move about 1,000 tons at 5–8 miles per hour, a reasonable speed for a lazy bicycle ride.* The 1840s brought us turn-screw motors (think propellers instead of paddle wheels) and faster speeds. Steel hulls debuted in the 1860s, largely solving the whole don’t-burn-your-ship problem, along with a host of other speed-limiting issues, like hull fouling. By the 1890s these technologies and more had several generations of kink workouts behind them, setting the stage for bigger, faster vessels. By 1914, some all-steel merchant ships were sailing forth at an impressive and impressively reliable 12–15 miles per hour. Add in the Suez and Panama Canals (1869 and 1914, respectively) and goods could reach more locations without having to fully circumnavigate continents. More bang, less buck.
到 1940 年，以石油为动力的内燃机开始取代以煤为动力的蒸汽机，增加了航程，减少了燃油货物的需求，并打破了商船队与帝国管理的煤站之间的联系。正如以煤为燃料的蒸汽动力从铁路逐渐流入海上航线一样，现在以石油为动力的内燃机也逐渐回归。每一项进步都有助于使越洋和内陆运输更加规律和可预测。成本直线下降，货物飙升，可靠性提高，货物以前所未有的规模运输。
By 1940, oil-powered internal combustion engines started replacing coal-powered steam, increasing ranges, decreasing fuel-cargo requirements, and breaking the link between merchant marines and imperial-managed coal stations. Just as coal-fueled steam power trickled from the railways to the sea-lanes, now oil-powered internal combustion trickled back. Each advance helped make both transoceanic and inland transportation more regular and predictable. Costs plummeted, cargoes soared, reliability improved, and goods were moving on a scale hitherto undreamt of.
真正的大宗商品国际贸易第一次成为可能。从 1825 年到 1910 年，经通货膨胀调整后的棉花和小麦货运价格下降了 94%。从 1880 年到 1910 年，从美国运往欧洲的小麦的运输成本从 18% 下降到 8%。既然交通问题已经从紧身衣变成了跳板，在英国，任何有选择权的人都不会继续吃当地的食物。1850 年至 1880 年间，英国谷物在英国人平均饮食中的比例从五分之三下降到五分之一。
For the first time, true international trade in bulk goods was possible. Between 1825 and 1910, inflation-adjusted prices for freighting cotton and wheat fell by 94 percent. Between 1880 and 1910, the cost component of transport for wheat being shipped from the United States to Europe fell from 18 percent to 8 percent. Now that transport issues had gone from straitjacket to springboard, no one in Britain who had the option would keep eating local foodstuffs. Between 1850 and 1880, the proportion of British cereals in the average British diet fell from three-fifths to one-fifth.
不仅仅是东西，还有人。正如深海运输的前工业化技术为许多工人提供了新的机会一样，铁路和轮船让普通人开始考虑新的生活。这段旅程——现在更容易、更快、更便宜，最重要的是，更安全——打开了世界。或者至少，它开辟了欧洲白人感到舒适的世界温带。三千万欧洲人——主要是英国人和爱尔兰人——迁移到定居国。
It wasn’t just stuff, but people, too. Just as the preindustrial tech of deep-sea transport provided new opportunities for many workers, railways and steamships allowed the average person to consider a new life. The journey—now easier, faster, cheaper, and above all, safer—opened up the world. Or at least, it opened up the world’s temperate zones that white Europeans found comfortable. Thirty million Europeans—mostly British and Irish—relocated to the settler states.
对于那些留下来的人来说，城市发生了根本性的变化。当地食物和森林的局限性消失了，甚至连农民*也发现从其他地方进口食物通常更容易。更简单的食物供应，再加上更多的钢铁，使城市不仅能够简单地向外扩张，而且还能向上扩张。人口密度随着城市规模、城市规划和新的健康相关技术而增加，从而加剧了人口增长。工业化前的城市通常依靠不断涌入的人口来代替死于饥饿或疾病的人，而工业化城市并不等同于死亡。他们可以维持自己的人口，因此增长迅速。
For those who stayed behind, the cities fundamentally transformed. Limitations of local food and forest evaporated, with even farmers* discovering it was often easier to import food from elsewhere. Easier food supplies, combined with more steel, enabled cities to not simply expand out, but also up. Population density increased hand in hand with urban size, city planning, and new health-related technologies, compounding population growth. Whereas preindustrial cities often relied on a constant influx of people to replace those who died of starvation or disease, industrialized cities were not synonymous with death. They could sustain their populations, and so grew rapidly.
到 1920 年代，内燃机先是彻底改变了水路运输，然后是铁路运输，它们已经足够小型化，导致了另一项与运输相关的大修：卡车。与需要港口的水路运输或主要限于坡度小于 1% 的区域的铁路运输不同，卡车可以到达任何道路可以到达的任何地方。对能源生产的需求进入了一个全新的时代。火车在 500 英里以上的行程中保持主导地位，但卡车接管了几乎所有的一切，尤其是最重要的最后一英里交付。混凝土和沥青开始取代泥土和砖块成为主要的筑路材料。罗马沦陷十五个世纪后，我们终于有了更好的道路。马粪终于，奇迹般地，突然——谢天谢地——从城市街道上消失了。
By the 1920s, the internal combustion engines that so revolutionized first water and then rail transport had been sufficiently miniaturized to lead to yet another transport-related overhaul: trucks. Unlike water transport, which required a port, or rail transport, which is largely limited to areas with slopes less than 1 percent, trucks could go anywhere that any road could reach. Demand for energy production entered an entirely new era. Trains retained dominance for trips over 500 miles, but trucks took over most of everything less, especially the all-important final mile of delivery. Concrete and asphalt started to replace dirt and brick as the primary road construction materials. Fifteen centuries after the fall of Rome, we finally got better roads. Horse poo finally, miraculously, suddenly—thankfully—vanished from urban streets.
到 1945 年，铁路、驳船和卡车都装满了制成品、农产品以及煤炭和小麦等大宗商品，这些都比以往任何时候都更容易生产。自从我们从非洲大草原边缘的树上掉下来以来，阻碍人类前进的交通和后勤僵局终于化为昔日的朦胧记忆。历史并没有像发射一样加速前进。我们从最早的蒸汽时代，死于痢疾和奎因博士，医学女人，到在一个人的生命跨度的边缘离开我身边的汽车度假文化。
By 1945, railways, barges, and trucks were all stuffed full of manufactured goods, agricultural products, and bulks like coal and wheat that were all ever-easier to produce. The transport and logistical logjams that had held humanity back since we fell out of trees on edges of the African savanna finally dissolved into the misty memories of yesteryear. History didn’t so much speed up as launch forward. We went from the earliest days of steam, dying of dysentery and Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, to get-off-my-side-car-vacation-culture on the outside edge of a single human life span.
背着重物到处走走就到此为止了。
So much for walking everywhere with a load on your back.
贸易美国化
The Americanization of Trade
现代之前的全球贸易是涓涓细流，以 21 世纪初的标准来看几乎算不上一个四舍五入的误差。东印度公司在 19 世纪初每年交易约 50 吨茶叶，到 19 世纪末达到 15,000 吨。今天，同样的 15,000 吨在世界某个地方每四十五秒左右就会被装卸一次。不要让小尺寸欺骗您。殖民化、大国战争、工业革命和奴隶贸易都是这种“舍入误差”的后果。但事实仍然是，在最近几十年里，我们已经从曾经的情况下进行了很大的冒险。在 1919 年帝国时代的最大范围内，帝国内部和国家之间的贸易总和仅占 GDP 的 10%。到秩序时代后期，这个数字翻了三倍。没有帝国。
Global trade before the modern era was a trickling dribble, barely a rounding error by the standards of the early twenty-first century. The East India Company traded about 50 tons of tea a year at the start of the nineteenth century and 15,000 toward the end of it. Today that same 15,000 tons is loaded or unloaded somewhere in the world every forty-five seconds or so. Don’t let the small size fool you. Colonization, great power wars, the Industrial Revolution, and the slave trade are all among the consequences of that “rounding error.” But the fact remains that in recent decades, we have ventured greatly from what once was. At the maximum extent of the imperial era in 1919, combined trade both within empires and among countries reached only 10 percent of GDP. As of the late Order era, that figure had tripled. Without empires.
怪美国人。
Blame the Americans.
美国人从第二次世界大战中脱颖而出，财力雄厚，并且拥有仅存的任何实质性海军。西欧软弱动摇，欧洲人感到大萧条时期的资本主义失败了，大战期间的领导力也失败了。美国同意重建欧洲国家，条件是贸易不再孤立于其帝国体系内。相反，拦截对手的船只成为最终的禁忌。哦，还有一件事：将不再有帝国。
The Americans emerged from World War II financially strong and with the only remaining navy of any substance. Western Europe was weak and shaken, with Europeans feeling failed by capitalism during the Great Depression and failed by their leadership during the Great Wars. The United States agreed to rebuild the European states on the condition that trade would no longer be isolated within their imperial systems. Conversely, intercepting rivals’ ships became the ultimate no-no. Oh, and one more thing: there would no longer be empires at all.
作为交换而授予的东西是真正具有变革性的。美国人将确保各大洲的所有国家都享有充分的进入全球海洋。曾经竞争激烈的战略环境变成了单一的、全球性的、安全的、功能齐全的内部水道，由柴油动力钢铁巨头填充和供应。在过去几个世纪开发的技术最终将被允许在没有战争幽灵的情况下发挥作用（或者，更重要的是，美国人会处理这种幽灵）。没有私掠。没有盗版。没有帝国没收。“全球”运输从帝国嫉妒的省份转移到全球经济的自由循环系统。
What was granted in exchange was truly transformational. The Americans would ensure that all countries on all continents would enjoy full access to the global ocean. What had once been a highly contested strategic environment transformed into a single, global, safe, functionally internal waterway filled and supplied by diesel-powered steel behemoths. The technologies developed during the previous couple of centuries would finally be allowed to function without the specter of war (or, more to the point, the Americans would handle said specter). No privateering. No piracy. No imperial confiscations. “Global” transport shifted from the jealous province of the empires to the unfettered circulatory system of the global economy.
虽然工业革命使产品从 A 地运送到 B 地变得更加便宜，但美国人的全球秩序使运输更加安全。在不断变化的技术基础和不断变化的地缘政治环境之间，成功地理的构成扩展为 . . . 几乎无处不在。这让我们所有人都朝着意想不到的方向前进。
While the Industrial Revolution made it much cheaper to ship products from A to B, it took the Americans’ global Order to make transport much safer. Between the changed technological base and the changed geopolitical circumstances, what constitutes a Geography of Success expanded to . . . almost everywhere. And that marched us all in some unexpected directions.
意义 1：
IMPLICATION 1:
船舶：更大，更好。. . 慢点
SHIPS: BIGGER, BETTER . . . SLOWER
在全球化时代，每个人都可以参与全球接入、制造和大众消费。增值工作不再被隔离在帝国中心。在别处制造需要燃料和原材料。在其他地方扩大工业基地和基础设施也需要同样的东西。其他地方不断扩大的中产阶级要求更多。
In the age of globalization, everyone could get in on global access, manufacturing, and mass consumption. No longer was value-added work sequestered to the Imperial Centers. Manufacturing elsewhere required fuel and raw materials. Expanding industrial bases and infrastructure elsewhere required the same. Expanding middle classes elsewhere demanded even more.
世界需要更多的船只来运输更多的产品，但在帝国中心之间的竞争不再是全球环境的决定性特征的世界中，安全不再是最重要的问题。竞争不再是枪支和海上航线控制，而是成本。这种从安全到效率的转变作为主要的企业关注点意味着世界不仅仅需要更多的船只；它还需要不同种类的船只。
The world needed more ships to transport more products, but in a world where competition among the Imperial Centers was no longer the global environment’s defining feature, security was no longer the overriding concern. Competition was no longer about guns and sea-lane control, but instead about cost. This shift from security to efficiency as the predominant corporate concern meant the world didn’t simply need more ships; it also needed different kinds of ships.
运输的规模经济来自四个因素：规模、人员、燃料和包装。前三个非常简单。
Economies of scale in transport come from four factors: size, crew, fuel, and packaging. The first three are pretty straightforward.
虽然建造船只的资本成本都随着尺寸的增加而增加，但并不是线性增加。一艘船的尺寸翻倍，建造成本可能“仅”增加 80% 左右。*将那艘船的尺寸从 75 个集装箱增加到 150 到 300 到 600 到 1,200 到 2,500 到 5,000 到 10,000 到今天最多 20,000 个集装箱，您已经为每个集装箱节省了超过 80%。同样，照看 10,000 个固定集装箱或 5,000 吨矿石所需的船员人数并不比照看 1,000 个集装箱或 500 吨矿石所需的人数多多少。燃料使用率与船舶尺寸遵循相同的总体趋势：将船舶尺寸增加一倍可将其燃料使用量减少约 25%。
While the capital costs to build a vessel all increase with size, it is not a linear increase. Double the size of a vessel and it probably “only” costs about 80 percent more to build.* Double the size of that ship from 75 containers to 150 to 300 to 600 to 1,200 to 2,500 to 5,000 to 10,000 to today’s maximum of 20,000 containers and you’ve racked up a per-container savings in excess of 80 percent. Similarly, the number of crew required to babysit 10,000 immobile containers or 5,000 tons of ore is not appreciably bigger than what is required to babysit 1,000 containers or 500 tons of ore. Fuel usage rates follow the same general trend as ship size: double the ship’s size to reduce its fuel use by about 25 percent.
然后是速度。燃料成本明显占航程成本的 60%，较快的航程比较慢的航程消耗更多。解决方案？如果安全不是问题，船只航行的速度会更慢。任何现代船舶都很少能达到每小时 18 英里以上的速度，*大多数散货船仅达到 14 英里。
Then there’s speed. Fuel costs writ large account for 60 percent of the cost of a voyage, with faster trips consuming much more than slower trips. The solution? If security isn’t an issue, ships sail more slowly. It’s rare for any modern vessel to get clocked at something faster than 18 miles per hour,* with most bulk cargo ships barely touching 14.
当然，如果所有船只都移动得更慢，那么在任何给定时刻，浮筒上的货物就会多得多。解决方案不仅仅是更多的船只或更大的船只，而是更多的船只和更大的船只。
And of course, if all ships are moving more slowly, then there is far more cargo on the float at any given moment. The solution isn’t simply more ships or bigger ships, but more ships and bigger ships.
因此，现代货船不仅更大，而且超大型。将大豆从墨西哥湾美国海域运往中国的船只大约是二战期间自由级和胜利级货船的八倍。按照现代标准，这甚至还算不上完美。相对于 1945 年的标准，现代集装箱船的尺寸是其 16 倍，而现代原油运输船则超过 40 倍。这些数字因船舶和货物类型的不同而有很大差异，但通常来说，与二战时期的船舶相比，今天的船舶的总成本——船员、燃料、船舶尺寸等等——大约是每单位货物的四分之一. *
Consequently, contemporary cargo vessels aren’t simply bigger, but supersized. The ships that move soy from the American sector of the Gulf of Mexico to China are about eight times the size of the Liberty- and Victory-class cargo ships from World War II. By modern standards that’s not even very accomplished. Relative to 1945 standards, modern container ships are sixteen times the size while modern crude carriers are over forty times. The numbers vary greatly by ship and cargo type, but as a rule, the all-in costs—crew, fuel, ship size, everything—for today’s vessels run about one-quarter per unit of cargo compared to World War II–era vessels.*
我相信您注意到我只讨论了列表中的前三个特性：大小、人员和燃料。第四个——包装——把我们带到了一个全新的方向。
I’m sure you noticed that I’ve only discussed the first three features on the list: size, crew, and fuel. The fourth—packaging—takes us in an entirely new direction.
意义 2：
IMPLICATION 2:
容器化：打造更好的盒子
CONTAINERIZATION: BUILDING A BETTER BOX
冷战背景下的布雷顿森林体系为自由贸易和下一轮全球化创造了必要条件，但实际情况与我们今天所知道的完全不同。运输成本可能已大幅下降，但整个系统中仍存在参差不齐、剧烈的摩擦。
Bretton Woods with the backdrop of the Cold War created the conditions necessary for free trade and the next round of globalization, but the reality on the ground was nothing like what we know today. Transport costs may have come down dramatically, but jagged, wild frictions existed across the entire system.
费力地将货物装进卡车，从所述卡车运到仓库，从所述仓库运到码头，由一组卡车司机在所述码头上包装到托盘上，所述托盘由另一组卡车司机通过一系列转移滑轮进入船舱，另一组卡车司机将固定所述托盘以便航行。然后，这艘船将在蓝色的海洋中航行。到达接收港后，另一组卡车司机将卸下前面提到的托盘进行检查，然后另一组卡车司机将所述托盘装载到另一辆卡车上，卡车将把它带到铁路站场，在那里另一个另一组另一组的团队成员会将其装载到轨道车上，然后所述轨道车将其运送到卸载设施，在那里所述托盘将被卸载到另一个 另一辆卡车。只有到那时——最后——那辆卡车才会被开到实际买东西的地方。
It took effort to pack goods into a truck, out of said truck into a warehouse, out of said warehouse onto a dock, packaged on said dock by a group of teamsters onto a pallet, said pallet shifted by another group of teamsters via a series of pulleys into a ship’s hold, where another another another group of teamsters would secure said pallet for sailing. Said ship would then sail the ocean blue. Upon arrival at the receiving port, another another another group of teamsters would unload the previously mentioned pallet for inspection, another another another another group of teamsters would then load said pallet onto another truck, which would take it to a railyard where another another another another another set of teamsters would load it onto a railcar, and said railcar would then ship it to an unloading facility, where said pallet would be unloaded onto another another truck. Only then—finally—would that truck be driven to the place that actually bought the thing.
一。片。在。A、时间。
One. Piece. At. A. Time.
到目前为止，从后勤和成本的角度来看，最糟糕的部分是港口本身。每件物品都需要与数以千计的其他物品分开，卸到码头上，进行物理检查，经常重新装回船上（因为它挡住了路），然后重新卸载，然后重新装船- 位于当地仓库，然后才能开始送到消费者手中。越来越大的船只需要越来越多、越来越大的仓库，离港口越来越远，开始了一条越来越长、越来越拥挤、越来越无情的货物重新洗牌，瓶颈一直延伸到船只本身。典型的港口体验耗时五天，每一端都有多群码头工人，不包括又大又黑的水手。总而言之，这是一个令人头疼的问题，它为令人窒息的盗窃和腐败创造了令人窒息的机会。难怪在 20 世纪之交，港口往往占总运输成本的一半。
By far the worst part—from a logistical and cost point of view—was the ports themselves. Each item needed to be separated from thousands of other items, unloaded onto the dock, physically inspected, often reloaded back onto the vessel (because it was in the way), then re-unloaded, and re-re-located to a local warehouse, before it could start making its way to the consumer. More and bigger ships required more and bigger warehouses farther and farther from the port, initiating an ever-longer, ever-more-congested slug trail of ever-more-relentless cargo reshuffling, with bottlenecks stretching back onto the vessels themselves. The typical port experience consumed five days, and multiple swarms of longshoremen on each end, not including the large and swarthy ship crew of large and swarthy deckhands. All in all it was a major pain in the ass that generated breathless opportunities for breathless levels of theft and corruption. No wonder that around the turn of the twentieth century, ports often accounted for half of total shipping costs.
直到，也就是说，我们想出了如何。. . 把东西放进去 . . 盒子。
Until, that is, we figured out how to . . . put things in . . . boxes.
到 1960 年代，不断增长的贸易量要求结束这种包装/重新包装的痛苦。解决方案是推出几种型号的运输箱——特别是二十英尺等效单位（或 TEU）和四十英尺等效单位（FEU）。您可能知道它们的俗称“集装箱”，并且无疑已经看到大量的它们被火车、卡车和半挂卡车运送。
By the 1960s, the ever-rising volumes of trade demanded an end to this packaging/repackaging agony. The solution was to debut a couple of models of shipping boxes—specifically the twenty-foot equivalent unit (or TEU) and the forty-foot equivalent unit (FEU). You probably know them by their colloquial name of “containers” and have undoubtedly seen scads of them being carted about by trains, trucks, and semis.
集装箱化进程总体上改变了运输方式，具体而言改变了世界船舶和港口的流程。
The containerization process transformed transport in general, and the world’s ships and ports processes in specific.
现在，制造商将他们的产品装入标准化容器并密封。集装箱与卡车配对，卡车将货物运送到港口，在那里集装箱被拆除并与其他同类集装箱堆叠在一起。当一艘船准备就绪时，集装箱被直接吊到船上（以适当的重量平衡顺序），由一个小船员移动穿过海洋，他们使用键盘比自由重量更好，然后降低到集装箱堆垛港口。由于拆包和重新包装没有根本不再发生在港口，港口不再需要仓库，除了设备和人员用途。他们现在所需要的只是一个平坦的停车场来容纳无穷无尽的集装箱堆垛。当时机成熟时，集装箱可能会先用栏杆稍稍挂起，然后直接吊到卡车上，然后将其简单地开到最终目的地进行拆包和处理。
Now a manufacturer fills a standardized container with their product and seals it. The container is mated to a truck, which drives the goods to a port, where the container is de-mated and stacked with others of its kind. When a ship is ready, the container is craned directly onto the ship (in the proper order for weight balance), moved across the ocean by a small crew that’s better with keyboards than free weights, and lowered onto a container stack portside. Since unpackaging and repackaging no longer occurs in the ports at all, ports no longer need warehouses, save for equipment and personnel purposes. All they now need is a flat parking lot to host endless container stacks. When the time comes, the container might be railed a bit before being craned directly onto a truck, and then it is simply driven off to its final destination for unpacking and processing.
从理论上讲，在很大程度上是在实践中，容器不会被打开一次。
In theory, and largely in practice, the container is not opened once.
让我们让这更个人化。如果您曾经搬过家，就会知道大多数人可以将他们拥有的所有东西都装进一辆十八轮大货车的后座。其中一个十八轮单元（即 FEU）长 40 英尺，宽和高约 8 英尺，内部约等于 2,700 立方英尺。想象一下您必须将您的东西存放几天的举动。您是愿意将所有物品拆包并堆叠到存储设施中，然后在准备好后将所有物品重新包装并重新堆叠到另一个容器中，还是将所有物品都放在停车场的原始 FEU 中，直到您获得新钥匙？
Let’s make this more personally accessible. If you’ve ever moved, you know that most people can fit everything they own into the back of an eighteen-wheeler. One of those eighteen-wheeler units (that’s a FEU) is 40 feet long and about 8 feet wide and tall, equaling about 2,700 cubic feet on the inside. Imagine a move where you have to stuff your things in storage for a few days. Would you rather unpack and stack everything into a storage facility and then repack and restack everything into another container when you’re ready, or just keep everything in the original FEU in a parking lot until you get your new keys?
现在再加上一次穿越大洋，每年重播该序列 2亿次，您就会开始看到全球经济变化的规模。容器中的内容无关紧要。Kias 或金橘。铝土矿或棒材工具。只要容器的总重量保持在上限以下，所有容器都可以以相同的方式处理。
Now add in an ocean crossing and replay that sequence 200 million times per year and you begin to see the scale of change for the global economy. It doesn’t matter what’s in the container. Kias or kumquats. Bauxite or bar tools. So long as the container’s total weight remains under upper limits, all containers can be handled identically.
这种标准化发生的原因是什么？命令。全球安全、全球商业、全球资本、全球规模，以及提供可靠性的压倒性意愿，以便世界能够建立其整个 . . . 世界围绕尺寸、重量、形状和锁具的统一标准，使无处不在的集装箱能够在供应链中无缝移动。早在1966年，影响就很明显了。两端的总港口周转时间从三到五周缩短到不到二十四小时。港口成本从占总运输成本的一半下降到不到五分之一。到 2019 年，集装箱船运载了全球贸易总额的约 50%，高于 1960 年代初期的零功能。
What did it take for this standardization to occur? The Order. Global security, global commerce, global capital, global scale, and an overpowering willingness to provide reliability so the world could build its entire . . . world around a unified standard for size, weight, shape, and locks, enabling the ubiquitous container to move seamlessly through the supply chain. As early as 1966, the impact was obvious. Total port turnaround times on both ends shrank from three to five weeks to less than twenty-four hours. Port costs dipped from half the total cost of shipping to less than one-fifth. By 2019, containerships carried approximately 50 percent of total global trade by value, up from functionally zero in the early 1960s.
重新设计的不仅仅是船舶和货物方法。端口也发生了变化。
It isn’t just ships and cargo methodology that have been redesigned. Ports have changed, too.
意义 3：
IMPLICATION 3:
港口：更大，更少。. . 别处
PORTS: BIGGER, FEWER . . . ELSEWHERE
港口总是需要方便的内陆通道，无论是获取输入还是分配输出。在工业革命之前，这通常意味着一条河流。想想汉堡、新奥尔良或上海。在最坏的情况下，港口需要一大块毗邻海洋的公寓。想想圣彼得堡、洛杉矶或曼谷。然而，在现代，集装箱的灵活性意味着港口需要的只是公路（最好是铁路）通道。港口现在不需要稀有且因此昂贵的地理对齐，而是可以位于城市以外，只要土地、劳动力和电力成本组合允许。想想天津、萨凡纳或圣约翰。
Ports have always required easy inland access, whether to access inputs or to distribute outputs. Before the Industrial Revolution, that typically meant a river. Think Hamburg, New Orleans, or Shanghai. At worst, ports required a big chunk of ocean-adjacent flat. Think St. Petersburg, Los Angeles, or Bangkok. In the modern day, however, containers’ flexibility means all a port needs is road (and, preferably, rail) access. Instead of needing a rare—and therefore expensive—geographic alignment, ports can now be located outside cities, wherever the mix of land, labor, and electricity costs allow. Think Tianjin, Savannah, or St. John.
但是，虽然较低的成本加上集装箱的灵活性使港口选址变得不那么挑剔，但港口本身也必须变得更加挑剔。现在任何东西都可以集装箱化和运输，港口必须能够作为绝对巨大吞吐量的中转站。随着船只变得越来越大，并不是每个港口都能接待。
But while lower costs, combined with the container’s flexibility, enabled port siting to be less finicky, the ports themselves had to become more so. Now that anything and everything could be containerized and shipped, the ports had to be able to serve as way stations for absolutely colossal through-volumes. And as ships became ever larger, not every port could play host.
首先被淘汰的是根本无法处理新的跨洋巨兽的中型区域港口。货物要么运往较新的大型集装箱港口，要么运往管理本地配送的非常小的港口。随着大型港口吸引越来越多的货物并变得越来越多。. . 大型甚至小型配送中心逐渐消失。毕竟，铁路线可以连接到较大的港口，而只需通过铁路将货物运送到小港口自己的配送网络。上游港口，尤其是无法停靠远洋船只的小港口，变得多余。
First to go were the medium-sized regional ports that simply couldn’t handle the new transoceanic behemoths. Cargo either went to the newer, gargantuan megacontainer ports or to the very small ports that managed local distribution. As the megaports drew more and more cargo and became more and more . . . mega, even small distribution hubs faded away. After all, rail lines could connect to the bigger ports and simply rail cargo to the small ports’ own distribution network. Ports upriver, especially smaller ones that could not handle oceangoing vessels, became redundant.
这种经济重组在世界各地发生，引发了成为区域中心的并发竞赛。设计用于服务单一都市区的港口——想想巴黎、伦敦、布鲁克林、圣路易斯或芝加哥的港口——几乎都消失了。取而代之的是，可以将自己扭曲成有助于大规模集装箱配送的地点——想想鹿特丹、费利克斯托、新泽西、休斯敦或塔科马的港口——突然出现。
These kinds of economic rearrangements happened all over the world, setting off concurrent races to become the regional hub. Ports designed to serve a single metro region—think the ports of Paris, London, Brooklyn, St. Louis, or Chicago—all but evaporated. Instead, locations that could contort themselves into a shape that facilitated broad-scale container distribution—think the ports of Rotterdam, Felixstowe, New Jersey, Houston, or Tacoma—exploded into being.
越来越大的船只在越来越少的港口之间航行，而港口本身却变得越来越大。
Larger and larger ships were sailing among fewer and fewer ports, which themselves became progressively larger and larger.
总的来说，前三个影响使海运成为王者。
Collectively, these first three implications have made maritime shipping king.
从 2000 年到 2020 年，将一个集装箱运过大西洋或太平洋的平均成本约为每个集装箱 700 美元。或者换句话说，每双鞋 11 美分。即使是传统的瓶颈也不是很。. . 拘留所。世界上规模最大的集装箱船之一——马士基 Triple-E 级——支付约 100 万美元通过苏伊士运河，但这笔费用由 18,000 多个集装箱分担。算下来每双大约 55 美元，或者每双鞋不到 1 美分。运输变得如此死板，以至于在 2019 年，中国回收行业不得不限制低质量回收垃圾的进口。
Between 2000 and 2020, moving a container across the Atlantic or Pacific averaged out to about $700 per container. Or put another way, 11 cents per pair of shoes. Even traditional choke points aren’t very . . . chokey. One of the world’s largest container ship classes in reasonably large-scale production—the Maersk Triple-E class—pays about $1 million to transit the Suez Canal, but that duty gets split among 18,000-odd containers. That comes out to about $55 each, or less than a cent per shoe pair. Transport has become so rote that in 2019 the Chinese recycling industry had to place restrictions on the import of low-quality recycled trash.
结合更大、更慢的船舶，集装箱化已将货物运输的总成本降低到不到上述货物总成本的 1%。在工业化之前，这个数字通常超过四分之三。在深水之前，这个数字通常在 99% 以上。
Combined with bigger, slower ships, containerization has reduced the total cost of transporting goods to less than 1 percent of said goods’ overall cost. Before industrialization, the figure was typically more than three-quarters. Pre-deepwater, the figure was often north of 99 percent.
撇开不能在伦敦、东京、上海、悉尼、纽约和里约之间进行卡车或铁路货运的小细节不谈，即使基础设施到位，成本比较也将是完全荒谬的。如果您想要一列能够在运力上与仅能勉强通过最近扩建的巴拿马运河的轮船相媲美的火车，那么您需要一辆超过 40英里长的火车。或者，您可以选择拥有 6500辆卡车的车队。
Leaving aside the quiet little detail that you can’t truck or rail cargo among London and Tokyo and Shanghai and Sydney and New York and Rio, even if the infrastructure were in place, cost comparisons would be utterly ridiculous. If you wanted a train that could compete in capacity with ships designed to just barely squeeze through the recently expanded Panama Canal, you’d need one more than forty miles long. Alternatively, you could go for a fleet of sixty-five hundred trucks.
随着运输成本现在四舍五入为零，其他一切的数学都发生了变化以匹配。
With transport costs now rounding to zero, the math of everything else has changed to match.
意义 4：
IMPLICATION 4:
城市：城市爆炸
CITIES: THE URBAN EXPLOSION
在工业革命之前，风、水和肌肉是使城市能够收集投入的唯一能源。这给城市规模设置了一个硬性上限。
Before the Industrial Revolution, wind, water, and muscle were the only power sources enabling a city to gather inputs. That put a hard cap on city size.
工业时代的技术将城市的范围扩大了几个数量级，并以前所未有的方式实现了资源集中。但正是这种扩张使城市变得贪婪。拥有更多经济活动的大城市需要更多的投入来推动该活动。这有点像那句古老的格言，城市需要 100 倍土地面积来生产木炭，但现在他们需要小麦作为食物，铁矿石用于钢铁，石油用于燃料，石灰石用于混凝土，铜用于布线，等等。
The technologies of the Industrial Age expanded a city’s reach by orders of magnitude and enabled concentrations of resources in ways previously unheard-of. But this very expansion made cities ravenous. Bigger cities with more economic activity require more inputs to fuel that activity. It is a bit like the old adage where cities needed 100 times their land area for charcoal, but now they needed wheat for food, iron ore for steel, oil for fuel, limestone for concrete, copper for wiring, and on and on.
出于必要，城市将其影响范围扩大到更广泛的地区。同样，地区将其范围扩大到帝国。美国人征服了西部，并将其农业资源和物质资源输送到东海岸的城市。日本人对满洲也做了同样的事情。欧洲人收获了他们的帝国。新技术的本质确保了帝国的扩张和获取渠道的冲突，这将导致竞争和相互厌恶，最终导致世界大战。
Cities expanded their reach to broader regions out of necessity. Regions expanded their reach to empires for the same. The Americans conquered the West and funneled its agricultural bounty and material resources to the cities of the East Coast. The Japanese did the same to Manchuria. The Europeans harvested their empires. The very nature of the new technologies ensured both imperial expansion and the conflicts over access that would contribute to the competition and mutual loathing that culminated in the world wars.
快进到第二次世界大战之后，美国人的命令甚至取消了对城市可以到达多远的理论限制。煤炭、食物，甚至人现在都可以从别处运来。其他任何地方。其他地方。不再需要控制城市想要收获的区域——需要收获的区域。随着世界现在成为收割场，所有城市都可以扩大规模。
Fast-forward to after World War II and the Americans’ Order removed even theoretical limits on just how far a city could reach. Coal, food, even people could now be brought in from somewhere else. Anywhere else. Everywhere else. Establishing control of the areas a city wanted to harvest—needed to harvest—was no longer necessary. With the world now the harvesting ground, all cities could increase in size.
意义 5：
IMPLICATION 5:
供应链：本地生产，全球销售
SUPPLY CHAINS: PRODUCING LOCALLY, SELLING GLOBALLY
前工业世界的一个核心特征是帝国中心。所有人都享受着温和的气候、平坦的地形以及海上和/或河流通道的神奇组合，这不仅让他们在当地竞争中占据优势，而且有足够的力量和稳定性去征服更远的土地。随着工业时代的到来，所有人都能够利用数百年来积累的财富和知识来从事大规模制造。
A central feature of the preindustrial world was the Imperial Centers. All enjoyed some magic mix of mild climate and flattish terrain and maritime and/or riverine access, which granted not simply a leg up on the local competition, but enough strength and stability to reach out and conquer lands beyond. As the Industrial Age dawned, all were able to leverage centuries of accrued wealth and knowledge to engage in mass manufacturing.
但所有人都面临着共同的限制。并非制造的所有步骤进程需要对相同的输入进行相同的访问。有的需要更多的铁，有的需要更多的劳动力，有的需要更多的煤，有的需要更多的博士。但是因为没有一个帝国会相互信任，所以每个帝国中心都得蒙混过关，试图在他们自己的独立系统中托管生产过程的所有步骤。
But all faced common restrictions. Not all steps of a manufacturing process require the same access to the same inputs. Some need more iron, some more labor, some more coal, some more people with doctorates. But because none of the empires would ever trust one another, it was up to each individual Imperial Center to muddle through, attempting to host all steps of the production process within their own jealously independent system.
美国领导的秩序的黎明改变了这一切。美国人并没有简单地取缔盟友之间的冲突；美国人保护着所有全球航运，就好像这是他们自己的国内商业一样，将运输带入了一个完全廉价的神圣时代。
The dawn of the American-led Order changed all that. The Americans didn’t simply outlaw conflict among their allies; the Americans guarded all global shipping as if it were their own internal commerce, ushering transport into an age of utterly inexpensive sanctity.
在一个人人都“安全”的世界里，世界上“成功”的地区不再能统治和/或剥削其他地区。这样做的一个有点意想不到的副作用是将地理从其在衡量一个国家的成功或失败中相当确定的作用降级为背景噪音。那些曾经落后的地区现在可以安全地开花。
In a world “safe” for all, the world’s “successful” geographies could no longer lord over and/or exploit the rest. A somewhat unintended side effect of this was to demote geography from its fairly deterministic role in gauging the success or failure of a country, to something that became little more than background noise. Those geographies once left behind could now bloom in safety.
大多数旧帝国中心也不会过分介意。旧的 Imperial Centers 不擅长的工艺，例如将铝金属拉成电线或补鞋的附加值相对较低的工艺，可以外包给另一个地方——一个更新的、正在崛起的参与者——全球化系统——可以更有效、更有竞争力地做到这一点。不断崩溃的交通成本，加上美国造成的交通神圣性，使得过去在一个城市完成的工作能够分散到全球一百个不同的地点。
Nor did most old Imperial Centers overly mind. A process that the old Imperial Centers did not excel at, such as the relatively low-value-added process of pulling aluminum metal into wires or the cobbling of shoes, could be outsourced to another location—a newer, rising player in the now-globalized system—that could do it more efficiently and competitively. The ever-collapsing cost of transport, combined with the American-caused sanctity of said transport, enabled work that used to be done all in one city to be hived apart into a hundred different locations across the globe.
航运曾经“仅限于”原始输入和成品输出，现在服务于看似无穷无尽的中间产品。现代多步制造供应链系统诞生。到 1960 年代，此类供应链已变得普遍，尤其是在汽车和电子产品领域。
Shipping, once restricted to “only” raw inputs and finished outputs, now serviced a seemingly endless array of intermediate products. The modern multistep manufacturing supply chain system was born. By the 1960s such supply chains had become common, in automotive and electronics in particular.
韩国、巴西、印度和中国只是几十个突然拥有实权的大国中的四个大国。在布雷顿森林体系之前的几十年和几个世纪里表现出色的许多“核心”领域——美国钢铁带和开辟运河的英国浮现在脑海中——都生锈了在这些前所未闻的竞争者的冲击下进入记忆。
South Korea, Brazil, India, and China were simply the four biggest of several dozen powers who suddenly held real roles. Many of the “core” areas that had done so well in the decades and centuries before Bretton Woods—the American Steel Belt and canalled Britain come to mind—rusted into memory under the onslaught of these heretofore unheard-of competitors.
冷战和冷战后全球稳定的时代使越来越多的国家能够加入其中。新玩家不仅在不同的几十年加入游戏：他们以不同的速度前进，使世界上越来越多的国家拥有截然不同的技术成熟度。
The Cold War and post–Cold War eras of extended global stability enabled more and more countries to join the fun. The new players didn’t only join the game in different decades: they advanced at different rates, populating the world with more and more countries at wildly different levels of technical sophistication.
到2022年，西欧、日本、英美等国家出现了先进的技术官僚国家；东北亚和中欧的发达工业化经济体；东南欧、拉丁美洲、安纳托利亚和东南亚的快速工业化经济体；中国、南亚、拉丁美洲和前苏联的混合经济体。越来越复杂的供应链将它们联系在一起。更多和更便宜的交通使这一切成为可能，这促进了更大的经济发展和一体化，这反过来又需要更多和更便宜的交通。
As of 2022, there are advanced technocracies in Western Europe, Japan, and Anglo-America; advanced industrialized economies in Northeast Asia and Central Europe; rapidly industrializing economies in southeastern Europe, Latin America, Anatolia, and Southeast Asia; and mixed economies in China, South Asia, Latin America, and the former Soviet Union. Ever-more-complex supply chains link them together. All were made possible by more and cheaper transport, which generated greater economic development and integration, which in turn demanded more and cheaper transport.
加上更大的船只、集装箱化和新型港口，不仅许多阻碍国家与邻国贸易的摩擦得到解决；它们逐渐消失，以至于跨洋、真正的全球多步贸易不仅成为可能，而且成为日常常态。截至 2022 年，全球约 80% 的贸易量和 70% 的价值贸易由远洋船只运输。
Add in bigger ships, containerization, and a new style of port, and not only did the many, many frictions that inhibited countries trading with their neighbors get sanded down; they melted away to the point that transoceanic, truly global multistep trade could not only become possible, but the everyday norm. As of 2022, some 80 percent of global trade by volume and 70 percent by value is transported by oceangoing vessels.
分开
COMES APART
随着技术的成熟和交通系统的丰富和多样化，两种截然不同的思想交织在一起定义了我们的现代系统：
As the techs matured and the transport system thickened and diversified, two contrasting thoughts wove together to define our modern system:
首先，工业技术变得越来越容易应用。锻造钢材比将其塑造成铁路线更难，后者比铺设铁路线更难，比开火车更难，比给轨道车装满水更难。当帝国制度结束时，荷兰人和日本人无法将他们建造的铁路系统带回家。他们的前殖民地很容易挪用并经营资产。与需要工匠大师的前工业技术不同，工业时代的大部分——尤其是数字时代——已被证明是即插即用的。
First, industrial techs became ever easier to apply. Forging steel is more difficult than fashioning it into rail lines, which is more difficult than laying the rail lines, which is more difficult than operating a train, which is more difficult than filling a railcar. When the imperial system ended, it wasn’t like the Dutch and Japanese could take the rail systems they had built home with them. It was pretty easy for their former colonies to appropriate and operate the assets. Unlike preindustrial technologies, which required master craftspeople, much of the Industrial Age—and especially the Digital Age—has proven to be plug-and-play.
其次，工业技术变得越来越难以维护。在任何距离上实现供应系统多样化的能力意味着将制造分解为数十个甚至数千个单独的步骤在经济上是有利的。建造这个或那个小部件的工人变得非常擅长，但他们对剩下的过程一无所知。净化二氧化硅的劳动力不会也不能制造硅片，不会也不能制造主板，不会也不能编码。
Second, industrial techs have become ever more difficult to maintain. The ability to diversify supply systems over any distance means it is economically advantageous to break up manufacturing into dozens, even thousands of individual steps. Workers building this or that tiny piece of widget become very good at it, but they are clueless as to the rest of the process. The workforce that purifies silicon dioxide does not and cannot create silicon wafers, does not and cannot build motherboards, and does not and cannot code.
这种影响力和专业化的结合使我们得出了一个非常明确和不祥的结论：一个人在一个地方消费的商品不再反映一个人在一个地方生产的商品。消费和生产的地域是不受约束的。我们不再只需要大规模的安全运输来将生产和消费联系在一起；我们现在需要大规模的安全运输来支持生产和消费本身。
This combination of reach and specialization takes us to a very clear, and foreboding, conclusion: no longer do the goods consumed in a place by a people reflect the goods produced in a place by a people. The geographies of consumption and production are unmoored. We no longer only need safe transport at scale to link production and consumption together; we now need safe transport at scale to support production and consumption themselves.
在许多方面，这一切都很棒。工业化加全球化不仅带来了历史上最快的经济增长，它们共同极大地提高了全世界数十亿人的生活水平。与令人震惊的不平等的前工业化世界不同，工业化/全球化组合实现了看似不可能的二重奏，使完全没有技能的人能够生活在高于滥用生存水平的水平上，同时比以往任何时候都更进一步、更快、更广泛地推动人类知识和教育的前沿前。
In many ways this is all great. Industrialization plus globalization has not only generated the fastest economic growth in history; collectively they have dramatically increased the standard of living of billions of people the world over. Unlike the shockingly unequal preindustrial world, the industrialization/globalization combo has achieved the seemingly impossible duology of enabling the utterly unskilled to live at something above an abused subsistence level while pushing the frontiers of human knowledge and education further and faster and more broadly than ever before.
但在更多方面，这非常糟糕。
But in far more ways, this is utterly awful.
伟大的联合国
The Great Unmaking
让我们用一些小的备忘单来集中注意力。
Let’s focus the mind with a little cheat-sheet set of bullets.
- 现代船只是肥大的野兽。集装箱船以接近每小时二十九英里的速度全速行驶。散货船是那个的一半。我们拥有的最快的民用船只是。. . 客运邮轮，主要是因为它们大多是空的。改装它们来运送玉米并不令人高兴。
- Modern vessels are fat beasts. Container ships running full tilt max out at just under twenty-nine miles per hour. Bulkers at half that. The fastest civilian ships we have are . . . passenger cruise liners, mostly because they are mostly empty space. No joy in refitting them to ship corn.
- 现代跨洋集装箱船可容纳数千个集装箱，其中一半以上装满了中间产品，这些中间产品对于几乎所有制成品的制造都是必不可少的。
- Modern transoceanic container ships hold thousands of containers, more than half of which are packed to the gills with intermediate goods essential to the fabrication of pretty much all manufactured products.
- 这些中间产品是由只知道如何生产每种产品的一个特定部分的劳动力制造的，尤其是在规模较低的一端。
- Those intermediate products are built by a workforce who only know how to produce one specific piece of each product, particularly at the lower-quality end of the scale.
- 聪明的国家可以做不那么聪明的工作。为服务器农场制造芯片的半导体制造工厂也可以为汽车或玩具制造芯片。反之则不然。
- Smart countries can do less-smart work. A semiconductor fabrication facility that makes chips for server farms can also make them for automobiles or toys. The reverse is not true.
- 现代港口很少，相距甚远，绝对庞大，而且通常不会与其服务的人群位于同一地点。
- Modern ports are few, far between, absolutely massive, and typically not colocated with the populations they serve.
- 现代城市如此之大，其经济如此专业化，以至于它们不仅需要定期访问大片领土，而且需要访问整个地球。
- Modern cities are so large and their economies so specialized that they require regular access not just to a huge swath of territory, but to the entire globe.
所有这些工作的核心定义特征是安全、廉价的交通。抑制那个和其余的。. . 一切都土崩瓦解。
The central defining trait in all this work is safe, cheap transport. Inhibit that and the rest of . . . everything simply falls apart.
虽然工业技术易于采用使它们能够轻松传播，但反之亦然。毕竟，如果当今无处不在的交通工具，人口中几乎没有什么技能可以使其保持当代世界的工业化风格链接因任何原因断开。劳动力要么高度专业化，几乎没有技能，要么证明世界几乎总是比你想象的更陌生，这是两者的结合。更糟糕的是，现代城市生活需要随时接触到分散在世界各地的许多人和地方，而城市对这些地方没有影响。简而言之，地区去工业化的速度要比工业化的速度快得多，而关键因素是交通运输的变化。
While industrial technologies’ ease of adoption enabled them to spread easily, the reverse is also true. After all, there is very little skill capacity within the population that might enable it to maintain the contemporary world’s flavor of industrialization should today’s omnipresent transport links break apart for any reason. The workforce is alternatively hyperspecialized, nearly unskilled, or, testament to the fact that the world is nearly always stranger than you think, a combination of the two. Even worse, modern city life requires ever-present access to so many peoples and places scattered around the world and over which a city has no influence. Put simply, regions can deindustrialize far more quickly than they industrialized, and the critical factor is what happens to transport.
去工业化的发生速度可能比你想象的要快得多。
Deindustrialization could happen far more quickly than you think.
想想那些又大又胖又慢的船。
Consider those big, fat, slow ships.
快速战争故事，在这种情况下，即 1980 年代的两伊战争：到 1983 年，冲突陷入僵局，导致两国向对方的船只投掷导弹，试图在经济上扼杀对手。总共有大约三百艘船只被击中。大约有 50 艘被禁用，12 艘沉没。与当时的全球航运规模相比，这只是一个注脚。
Quick war story, in this case, the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s: By 1983 the conflict had reached a stalemate, inducing both countries to fling missiles at one another’s shipping in attempts to strangle their opponent economically. Altogether some three hundred vessels were struck. About fifty were disabled, and a dozen sunk. Compared to the size of global shipping at the time, it was barely a footnote.
但那一小撮事件几乎摧毁了全球。. . 保险业。
But that handful of events nearly destroyed the global . . . insurance sector.
美国对航运的安全保证被认为是铁定的。毕竟，几十年来全球范围内发生的事件还不多。甚至在大约 1950 年到 1975 年的这段时间里，对航运的攻击为零。因此，海上保险的损失准备金至多是最低限度的。用大量现金为此类事件做准备就像拨出数十亿美元来解决伊利诺伊州的地震索赔一样。但当两伊战争的索赔滚滚而来时，保险公司很快就耗尽了营运资金。因此，他们向再保险公司提出索赔，而这些公司也很快耗尽了资金。突然间所有保险公司发现他们的整个行业都在悬崖边上摇摇欲坠。火灾保险、汽车保险、抵押贷款保险、健康保险——都没有关系。由于大多数保险公司通过大型金融机构与大多数债券市场挂钩，灾难迫在眉睫。
The American security guarantee for shipping was considered ironclad. After all, there had been less than a handful of incidents globally for decades. There was even a period from roughly 1950 to 1975 with zero attacks on shipping. Loss provisions on maritime insurance, therefore, were, at most, minimal. Preparing for such incidents with large sums of cash would have been like setting aside billions to address earthquake claims in Illinois. But when the claims from the Iran-Iraq War rolled in, insurance firms quickly ran out of operating capital. So they filed claims with their reinsurance firms, who quickly ran dry as well. Suddenly all insurance companies discovered that their entire industry teetered on the precipice. Fire insurance, car insurance, mortgage insurance, health insurance—it didn’t matter. And with most insurance firms being linked to most bond markets via large financial houses, catastrophe loomed.
唯一阻止大规模全球金融崩溃的是里根政府的三部分决定：(a) 在波斯湾实际护送非伊朗航运，(b) 重新标记所有此类航运作为美国船只，以及 (c) 为所有此类航运提供一揽子主权赔偿。两个甚至没有金融部门的非商业大国之间的地方军事争端迅速升级到只有超级大国拥有防止全球金融崩溃的军事、金融和法律实力的程度。
The only thing that prevented a broad-scale, global financial breakdown was the Reagan administration’s three-part decision to (a) physically escort non-Iranian shipping in the Persian Gulf, (b) reflag all such shipping as American vessels, and (c) provide a blanket sovereign indemnity to all such shipping. A local military spat between a pair of nonmerchant powers that didn’t even have financial sectors quickly spiraled up to the point that only a superpower had the military, financial, and legal strength to prevent a global financial meltdown.
想象一下，如果今天发生类似的事件。从 1970 年到 2008 年，美国人几乎总是在波斯湾拥有一个航母群（自 1991 年沙漠风暴冲突以来，通常是两个）。1983 年护航商业航运只需要对巡逻模式进行一些更改。但自 2015 年以来，美国人一次在该地区根本没有大型船只的情况下航行数月已成为常态。到 2021 年底，美国人已从整个地区撤出所有常规地面部队。没有美国，只有少数大国——法国、英国、日本和中国——甚至可以达到拥有军事资产的波斯湾。其中只有日本具备有效采取行动的技术能力，而且没有一家拥有建立有意义的护航队所需的船只。
Imagine if a similar event were to occur today. From 1970 through 2008, the Americans nearly always had a carrier group in the Persian Gulf (and since the 1991 Desert Storm conflict, typically two). Escorting commercial shipping in 1983 merely required a few changes to patrol patterns. But since 2015 it has become normal for the Americans to go months at a time without ships of size in-region at all. By the end of 2021, the Americans had removed all regular ground troops from the region as a whole. Absent the United States, there are only a handful of powers—France, the United Kingdom, Japan, and China—who could even reach the Persian Gulf with military assets. Of them only Japan has the technical capacity to act in force, and none have the vessels required to establish meaningful convoys.
想象一下，如果有问题的船只是集装箱船而不是散货船。一艘船将容纳数千个集装箱，其中包含数万（数十万？）的产品。在 1980 年代的事件中，即使那些沉没的船只也及时重新浮起并继续其生命。现代集装箱货物不可能发生这种情况（此外，如果一块主板在海湾底部放置了几天，你会买一台电脑吗？）。
Imagine if the ships in question were container ships instead of bulkers. One ship would hold thousands of containers containing tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of products. In the 1980s event, even those ships sunk were in time refloated and continued on with their lives. There is no way that would happen to modern containerized cargo (besides, would you buy a computer if a piece of the motherboard had sat on the bottom of the Gulf for a few days?).
想象一下，如果这样的事件发生在不同的地点。80 年代的伊朗和伊拉克是最终的无附加值经济体。本地消费明显受限。不参与制造供应系统。如果航运在波罗的海或东中国海遭到袭击，那将是欧洲和亚洲制造业的中心。现代集装箱船不会将单一产品从一个港口运送到另一个港口，而是绕行。他们前往多个港口，边走边取放装满各种令人眼花缭乱的产品的集装箱。如果任何一艘船无法运输或卸下货物，就会影响跨多个行业的成百上千条供应链和多个区域。即使只是少数几个港口的短暂延误也足以迫使整个行业合理化，更不用说实际损失船只了。俗话说，造一辆车需要三万块。如果您只有 29,999 块，那么您就拥有了一个超大尺寸的镇纸。
Imagine if such an event occurred in a different location. Iran and Iraq in the 1980s were the ultimate no-value-added economies. Starkly limited local consumption. No participation in manufacturing supply systems. What if shipping was struck in the Baltic Sea or the East China Sea, places central to European and Asian manufacturing. Modern container ships do not take single products from one port to another, but instead run circuits. They travel to multiple ports, picking up and dropping off containers filled with a dizzying variety of products as they go. If any single ship is unable to transport or disgorge its cargo, impacts cascade throughout hundreds to thousands of supply chains across multiple industries and multiple regions. Even brief delays at only a handful of ports would be sufficient to force a rationalization of entire industries, to say nothing of actually losing ships. As the saying goes, it takes 30,000 pieces to make a car. If you only have 29,999 pieces you’ve got an ambitiously sized paperweight.
想象一下，如果这样的事件不是一次性的。1983 年与 2022 年的规模截然不同。在更加差异化的供应链、更多财富和更多国家之间，当今全球海运货物的总价值现在是原来的六倍。使用过去四分之一千年的数据进行的粗略计算表明，将运输成本降低 1% 会使贸易量增加约 5%。在贸易赋权的现代世界消失在珍贵的记忆中之前，人们不需要长时间倒转。
Imagine if such an event were not a one-off. The scale of 1983 versus 2022 is radically different. Between more differentiated supply chains, more wealth, and more countries, the total value of today’s global seaborne cargo is now six times larger. Back-of-the-envelope math using data from throughout the past quarter millennia suggests that reducing transport costs by 1 percent results in an increase of trade volumes by about 5 percent. One doesn’t need to run that in reverse for long before the trade-empowered modern world fades into a treasured memory.
底线：我们所知道的世界非常脆弱。那就是它正在努力设计的时候。今天的经济格局与其说依赖于美国，不如说非常依赖美国的战略和战术监督。除去美国人，长途航运就会从常态降级为例外。消除由于人口崩溃导致的大众消费，以及大规模整合的整个经济论据崩溃。不管怎样，我们的“常态”即将结束，而且很快就会结束。
Bottom line: the world we know is eminently fragile. And that’s when it is working to design. Today’s economic landscape isn’t so much dependent upon as it is eminently addicted to American strategic and tactical overwatch. Remove the Americans, and long-haul shipping degrades from being the norm to being the exception. Remove mass consumption due to demographic collapses and the entire economic argument for mass integration collapses. One way or another, our “normal” is going to end, and end soon.
未来的世界：吸引和避免危险
THE WORLD TO COME: COURTING—AND AVOIDING—DANGER
美国主导的秩序最神奇、在某种程度上也是出乎意料的结果是它在多大程度上改变了那些很少——如果曾经——参与过任何大规模、多国贸易体系的地区。世界上大部分地区并不享有自然鼓励经济活动的地理环境，例如西欧或北美常见的温带气候或密集的河流网络。
The most miraculous and, to a degree, unexpected outcome of the American-led Order is the extent to which it transformed areas that had rarely—if ever—been participants in any large-scale, multistate trading system. Most of the world does not enjoy a geographic setup that naturally encourages economic activity, like the temperate climates or the dense river networks common to Western Europe or North America.
该命令使地理变得不那么重要了。美国人现在将保护你们的边界以及你们的对外贸易。这样的结构使以前从未发展过的地区，或者在这个或那个帝国的脚下被压垮的地区，能够作为独立的参与者崛起。自 1945 年以来，人类所看到的最大经济增长是在这些直到最近才被忽视和直到最近经济上已经不复存在的地区的基数效应增长。这意味着随着美国人陷入一种“不是我的猪，不是我的农场”的心态，破坏的最大倾向和这些破坏的最大影响将不仅在相同的地点，而且将在相同的新地点位置。
The Order made geography matter less. The Americans would now protect your borders as well as your external commerce. Such a structure enabled geographies that had never developed before, or that had been crushed under the boot of this or that empire, to rise up as independent players. The greatest economic growth humanity has seen in the time since 1945 has been base-effect growth within these until-recently-neglected and until-recently-economically-defunct geographies. That means as the Americans descend into a mindset of not-my-pig, not-my-farmism, the greatest propensity for disruption and the greatest impacts of those disruptions will not only be in the same locations, they will be in the same new locations.
这些即将疯狂的地区中的第一个是亚洲第一岛链上的领土和沿海地区，该地区包括日本、中国、韩国和台湾，以及较小程度的菲律宾、越南、印度尼西亚、马来西亚、泰国和新加坡。当一个人从南到北旅行时，存在的资源逐渐消失，而制造业的价值和数量往往遵循相反的梯度。这是一个竞争激烈的自然区域，其特点是资源需求集中、地球上最长的供应线和巨大的出口依赖性。结果？到处都是中间品，而且都是水运。
The first of these soon-to-be-crazy geographies are the territories on and coastward of Asia’s First Island Chain, a region that includes Japan, China, Korea, and Taiwan, and to a lesser degree the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore. What resources exist gradually peter out as one travels from south to north, while the value and volume of manufacturing tend to follow the opposite gradient. It is a natural area of intense competition characterized by concentrated resource demand, the longest supply lines on Earth, and massive export dependency. The result? Intermediate goods everywhere, with all of them being shipped by water.
这种漏洞和集成的结合只能发生在外部力量迫使每个人都表现得很好的安全环境中。然而，即使有美国的监视，东亚也从未发展出区域合作体系，甚至连军事交流都达不到的外交压力释放阀也没有。中国讨厌日本，日本（也许现在下意识地）想要殖民韩国和中国部分地区，台湾想要核威慑，韩国人不相信任何婊子。
This combination of vulnerability and integration could have only occurred in a security environment in which an external power forced everyone to play nice. Yet even with American overwatch, East Asia never developed a regional system of cooperation, or even diplomatic pressure release valves that fall short of military exchange. China hates Japan, Japan (perhaps now subconsciously) wants to colonize Korea and parts of China, Taiwan wants a nuclear deterrent, and the South Koreans trust no bitch.
更糟糕的是，除了日本之外，没有一个地方大国有能力确保自己的供应或贸易线。很难评估谁的处境更糟：韩国和台湾几乎完全依赖美国的战略海军监视，或者中国必须突破多个敌对战斗人员（包括所有国家/地区）的水域链）以及六个瓶颈以到达任何市场或资源访问很重要。. . 使用基本上只能进行沿海作战的海军。*
Even worse, with the notable exception of Japan, none of the local powers has the ability to secure its own supply or trade lines. It is difficult to evaluate who is in a worse position: South Korea and Taiwan, who suffer a near-complete dependence upon American strategic naval overwatch, or China, who would have to punch through the waters of multiple hostile combatants (including all the countries of the Chain) as well as a half dozen more choke points to reach any market or resource access that matters . . . using a navy that is largely only capable of coastal operations.*
中国的法西斯主义已经达到了这一点，但在人口老龄化导致国内消费崩溃、去全球化导致出口市场丧失以及无法保护一切运转所需的能源和原材料进口之间，中国正在拥抱自恋的民族主义有可能引发内部动荡，这将消耗共产党。或者至少这就是中国历史上（反复）发生过的事情，当时政府无法再向其人民提供商品。
Chinese fascism has worked to this point, but between a collapse of domestic consumption due to demographic aging, a loss of export markets due to deglobalization, and an inability to protect the imports of energy and raw materials required to make it all work, China’s embracing of narcissistic nationalism risks spawning internal unrest that will consume the Communist Party. Or at least that’s what happened before (repeatedly) in Chinese history, when the government could no longer provide its people with the goods.
日本似乎注定要继承该地区，但未来不会那么整洁。当然，日本强大的海军影响力意味着它可以在几周内扼杀中国并选择任何蓝水冲突的时间和地点，但即使处于弱势，中国也有能力打击其海岸数百英里内的目标。这不仅包括日本本岛的部分地区，还包括韩国的大部分地区和整个台湾。如果中国的治理没有完全崩溃（诚然，在中国历史上已经发生过几次），整个地区都会变成任何类型的水上航运的危险地带。
Japan would seem set to inherit the region, but the future isn’t going to be nearly that tidy. Sure, Japan’s superior naval reach means it can strangle China in a few weeks and choose the time and place of any blue-water conflicts, but even in weakness China has the ability to strike targets within a few hundred miles of its coast. That doesn’t simply include portions of the Japanese Home Islands, but also most of South Korea and all of Taiwan. Anything short of a complete governance collapse in China (which admittedly has occurred several times throughout Chinese history) will turn the entire region into a danger zone for any sort of shipping on the water.
没有哪个地区从订单中获益更多，没有哪个地区会因它的终结而遭受更大的损失，我们对现代制造业的了解在任何人第一次向一艘商业船只开枪时就结束了。
No region has benefited more from the Order, no region will suffer more from its end, and everything we know about modern manufacturing ends the first time anyone shoots at a single commercial ship.
第二个令人担忧的地区是波斯湾。解释为什么并不是特别困难。当地气候范围从干旱到。. . 沙漠。通常，这会使种群数量不会少，而是会减少。但是有石油，这改变了一切。
The second region of concern is the Persian Gulf. Explaining why isn’t particularly difficult. Local climates range from arid to . . . desert. Normally this would keep populations not so much small, but minute. But there’s oil and that has changed everything.
在全球化的背景下，美国人别无选择，只能在海湾巡逻，并卷入该地区政治的痛苦细节。石油推动全球贸易，全球贸易推动美国联盟，而美国联盟为美国的安全提供了动力。如果没有海湾地区相对和平——按照历史标准，海湾地区自 1950 年以来一直相对和平——美国的全球战略在到达时就会死机。
Under globalization, the Americans had no choice but to patrol the Gulf in force, and involve themselves in the painful minutiae of the region’s politics. Oil powered global trade, global trade powered the American alliance, and the American alliance powered American security. Without the Gulf being relatively peaceable—and by historical standards, the Gulf since 1950 has been relatively peaceable—America’s global strategy would have been dead on arrival.
石油加上美国人的存在，改变了该地区的可能性。该地区没有流浪的贝都因人、一群沿海珍珠村和很久以前因千年灌溉而盐碱化的土地，而是拥有未来主义城市、人口过剩的大型综合体、饱受战争蹂躏的城市景观和腹地的不稳定组合，在许多地区，近乎奴隶的下层阶级
That oil, combined with the Americans’ presence, has transformed the region’s possibilities. Instead of wandering Bedouin, a cluster of coastal pearling villages, and lands long ago salt-poisoned from millennia of irrigation, the region instead boasts an erratic mix of futuristic cities, overpopulated megaplexes, war-torn cityscapes and hinterlands, and in many areas, a near-slave underclass.
该地区出口石油和天然气。. . 几乎没有别的。它进口食品。技术。电子产品。白色家电。衣服。手机商品。电脑货。机械。飞机。汽车。建筑材料。几乎所有的东西。包括劳动力——熟练的和非熟练的。甚至骆驼。几乎每一个碳氢化合物分子都通过水运出，而几乎每包进口货物都以同样的方式运输。在国际化航运崩溃的世界里，霍尔木兹海峡的变通办法最终价值有限。它们旨在绕过伊朗的威胁，而不是秩序的崩溃。
The region exports oil and natural gas and . . . almost nothing else. It imports food. Technology. Electronics. White goods. Clothing. Cellular goods. Computer goods. Machinery. Planes. Automobiles. Building materials. Pretty much everything. Including labor—both skilled and unskilled. Even camels. Nearly every molecule of hydrocarbons is shipped out by water, while nearly every packet of imports travels the same way. In a world of collapsed internationalized shipping, Strait of Hormuz workarounds are ultimately of limited value. They were designed to bypass the threat of Iran, not the collapse of the Order.
这并不意味着该地区将从人类的集体雷达中消失。海湾地区所拥有的——石油——正是南亚、东亚和欧洲都迫切需要的。但所有地方大国都受苦于海军无法有效巡逻自己的海岸线，更不用说护航当地交通，更不用说看护船只安全进出霍尔木兹，更不用说护卫开往最终消费者的油轮或从远方进港的散货和集装箱船了供应商。
This does not mean the region will vanish from humanity’s collective radar. What the Gulf has—oil—is what South Asia, East Asia, and Europe will all desperately need. But all the local powers suffer from navies that cannot effectively patrol their own coastlines, much less escort local traffic, much less see ships safely in or out of Hormuz, much less guard tankers bound for end-consumers or bulk and container ships inbound from distant suppliers.
任何外国势力也不能用美国式的安全毯来扼杀该地区。美国军方认为过度杀伤力被低估了这一无可争议的事实也许是一个突出的证明，更广泛的世界各国海军联合起来的力量投送能力还不到美国海军的十分之一。全球无法将规范强加于该地区将导致长达数十年的全球萧条，并确保六个国家的努力严重不足大国——日本、英国、法国、印度、土耳其和中国——来挽救。. . 来自血腥混乱的东西。这将是一团糟。
Nor can any foreign power smother the region with an American-style security blanket. In perhaps the preeminent demonstration of the undisputed fact that the U.S. military feels that overkill is underrated, the combined navies of the wider world have less than one-tenth the power projection capacity of the U.S. Navy. A global inability to impose norms on the region will guarantee a decades-long global depression as well as ensure a succession of woefully inadequate efforts by a half-dozen powers—Japan, the United Kingdom, France, India, Turkey, and China—to salvage . . . something from the bloody chaos. It’s going to be a mess.
第三个需要注意的地区是欧洲。我们认为现代欧洲是一个文化、民主与和平的地区。作为逃脱了历史。但这种逃避主要是由于美国人对欧洲所有事物的重组。平静的历史表象之下是地球上饱受战争蹂躏和战略上最不稳定的一块土地。现代欧洲是布雷顿森林体系的高度和完整技巧的最纯粹的升华。
The third region to watch out for is Europe. We think of modern Europe as a region of culture, democracy, and peace. As having escaped history. But that escape is largely due to the Americans’ restructuring of all things European. What lies under the historical veneer of calm is the most war-torn and strategically unstable patch of land on the planet. Modern Europe is the purest distillation of the heights and complete artifice of the Bretton Woods system.
未来欧洲的问题很多，但有四个很突出。
Future Europe’s problems are many, but four stand out.
- 首先是能源：欧洲人比亚洲人更依赖能源进口，没有两个欧洲大国认为可以用同样的方式解决问题。德国人担心不与俄罗斯人达成协议就意味着战争。波兰人希望与除俄罗斯以外的任何人达成协议。西班牙人知道唯一的解决办法是在西半球。意大利人担心他们必须占领利比亚。法国人想迫使阿尔及利亚达成协议。英国人盯上了西非。每个人都是对的。每个人都错了。
- The first is energy: The Europeans are more dependent upon energy imports than the Asians, and no two major European countries think that problem can be solved the same way. The Germans fear that not having a deal with the Russians means war. The Poles want a deal with anyone but Russia. The Spanish know the only solution is in the Western Hemisphere. The Italians fear they must occupy Libya. The French want to force a deal on Algeria. The Brits are eyeing West Africa. Everyone is right. Everyone is wrong.
- 第二个是人口统计：欧洲国家很久以前就已经老化，甚至超过了理论上的人口再增长点，这意味着欧盟现在在功能上是一个出口联盟。没有美国主导的秩序，欧洲人就失去了出口商品的任何可能性，这也就消除了以目前的形式维持欧洲社会的可能性。
- The second is demographic: The European countries long ago aged past the point of even theoretical repopulation, meaning that the European Union is now functionally an export union. Without the American-led Order, the Europeans lose any possibility of exporting goods, which eliminates the possibility of maintaining European society in its current form.
- 第三是经济偏好：也许现在主要是下意识的，但欧洲人知道他们的血腥历史。欧洲领导人做出了大量有意识的决定，以社会主义倾向改造他们的制度，以便他们的人民将归属于他们的集体制度。这奏效了。这很好用。但只有在命令的背景下，美国人才能支付大部分国防费用并实现欧洲人永远无法促进的增长。去全球化和欧洲人口统计数据和缺乏全球影响力表明，永久性衰退是对地缘政治茶叶的更好解释之一。我看不到欧洲社会主义民主模式的核心可以生存的前进道路。
- The third is economic preference: Perhaps it is mostly subconscious these days, but the Europeans are aware of their bloody history. A large number of conscious decisions were made by European leaders to remodel their systems with a socialist bent so their populations would be vested within their collective systems. This worked. This worked well. But only in the context of the Order with the Americans paying for the bulk of defense costs and enabling growth that the Europeans could have never fostered themselves. Deglobalize and Europe’s demographics and lack of global reach suggest that permanent recession is among the better interpretations of the geopolitical tea leaves. I do not see a path forward in which the core of the European socialist-democratic model can survive.
- 第四个也是最后一个问题：并非所有欧洲国家生而平等。对于每个英国重量级人物，都有一个希腊篮子。对于每一个与世隔绝的法国，都有一个脆弱的拉脱维亚。一些国家安全或富裕，或有投射力量的传统。其他人则脆弱或贫穷，或者只不过是历史上的擦鞋垫。或许最糟糕的是，最大的经济体（德国）别无选择，只能成为一切的中心力量，而两个最有能力独自行动的国家（法国和英国）两面下注，从未真正融入了欧洲其他地区。没有理由指望法国人利用他们的影响力造福欧洲，而且也没有有理由期待英国的援助，英国于 2020 年正式脱离欧盟。
- The fourth and final problem: Not all European states are created equal. For every British heavyweight, there is a Greek basket case. For every insulated France, there is a vulnerable Latvia. Some countries are secure or rich or have a tradition of power projection. Others are vulnerable or poor or are little more than historical doormats. Perhaps worst of all, the biggest economic player (Germany) is the one with no options but to be the center weight of everything, while the two countries with the greatest capacity to go solo (France and the United Kingdom) hedged their bets and never really integrated with the rest of Europe. There’s little reason to expect the French to use their reach to benefit Europe, and there’s no reason to expect assistance from the British, who formally seceded from the European Union in 2020.
不幸的是，历史为我们提供了一些相当明确的前进道路。随着长途海上运输的可靠性逐渐消失，而美国——迄今为止欧洲最大的市场——一意孤行，欧洲人将非常重视保护他们所拥有和知道的东西：他们自己的供应链和他们自己的市场。欧洲作为秩序时代最保护主义的经济体起步于此无济于事。
History, unfortunately, offers us some fairly clear paths forward. As the reliability of long-haul maritime transport evaporates and the United States—by far Europe’s largest market—goes its own way, the Europeans will put a premium on protecting what they have and know: their own supply chains and their own markets. That Europe is starting as the most protectionist set of economies of the Order era doesn’t help.
最终结果将是创建几个小欧洲，因为各个大国都试图在更广泛的地区投放经济、文化和（在某些情况下）军事网络。英国、法国、德国、瑞典和土耳其都将按自己的方式行事，并试图吸引和/或胁迫选定的邻国加入。整合将受到适当的影响。对于那些了解波斯、希腊、罗马、拜占庭、奥斯曼、德国、英国、法国、中世纪或早期工业历史的人来说，这会让人感到非常熟悉。毕竟，历史没有结局。
The end result will be the creation of several mini-Europes as various major powers attempt to throw economic, cultural, and (in some cases) military nets over wider regions. The United Kingdom, France, Germany, Sweden, and Turkey will all go their own way and attempt to attract and/or coerce select neighbors to come along for the ride. Integration will suffer appropriately. For those of you who know your Persian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, German, British, French, medieval, or early industrial histories, this will feel disturbingly familiar. After all, history has no endgame.
欧洲人特别着迷地中海是值得的。根据该命令，它对欧洲大陆来说一直是一条可爱的内部通道，但展望未来，它更有可能回到其作为世界上最具争议的水道的历史常态。通过苏伊士运河，地中海是欧洲与波斯湾石油和东亚制造业的连接点。埃及无法保护运河区，但也没有任何一个欧洲国家可以独霸埃及。通过土耳其海峡，地中海将欧洲与前苏联国家的能源和农业盈余联系起来。土耳其绝对有把握接管海峡，没有人有能力在自家前院挑战土耳其人。
It will be worth the Europeans’ while to obsess particularly about the Mediterranean. Under the Order it has been a bit of a lovely internal channel for the Continent, but looking forward it is far more likely to return to its historical norm of being the world’s most contested waterway. Via the Suez Canal, the Mediterranean is Europe’s connection to Persian Gulf oil and East Asian manufactures. Egypt cannot protect the canal zone, but neither can any individual European country dominate Egypt. Via the Turkish Straits, the Med is Europe’s connection to the energy and agricultural surpluses of the former Soviet states. Turkey is absolutely certain to take over the Straits and no one has the capacity to challenge the Turks in their own front yard.
这些比赛对历史专业的学生来说都不是新鲜事。新鲜的是美国人扼杀了他们。所有的人。几十年来。
None of these competitions are new to students of history. What has been new is that the Americans have smothered them. All of them. For decades.
要相信全球化将在没有总体执行者和裁判的情况下继续下去，你必须相信三件事：
To believe that globalization will continue without an overarching enforcer and referee, you must believe three things:
首先，特定地区的所有大国都将同意按照最强大的地区大国的要求行事。日本人和台湾人将加入中国重新定义东亚结构、经济、政治和军事安排的努力。随着德国人逐渐过时，法国人、波兰人、丹麦人、荷兰人和匈牙利人（以及其他国家）将积极地将财富和控制权转移到德国。沙特阿拉伯、伊拉克、科威特、卡塔尔、巴林和阿拉伯联合酋长国将在区域控制和石油政策问题上服从伊朗。乌克兰、爱沙尼亚、拉脱维亚、立陶宛、瑞典、芬兰、波兰、摩尔多瓦、罗马尼亚和乌兹别克斯坦不会抵抗俄罗斯重新控制它们。巴基斯坦将接受印度的大国和掌权。伊朗、伊拉克、叙利亚、俄罗斯、德国也不会抗拒土耳其挤上大桌子。各个非洲国家将悄悄加入新的殖民浪潮。
First, that all powers in a given region will agree to do what the most potent regional power demands. That the Japanese and Taiwanese will accede to Chinese efforts to redefine the structural, economic, political, and military arrangements of East Asia. That the French, Poles, Danes, Dutch, and Hungarians (among others) will actively transfer wealth and control to Germany as the Germans age into obsolescence. That Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates will defer to Iran on issues of regional control and oil policy. That Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Sweden, Finland, Poland, Moldovia, Romania, and Uzbekistan will not resist Russia reasserting control over all of them. That Pakistan will accede to India being large and in charge. That Iran, Iraq, Syria, Russia, and Germany will not resist Turkey muscling itself up to the big table. That the various African nations will quietly accede to a renewed colonial wave.
自 1945 年以来，美国人一直搁置所有这些清算。现在移除美国的安全环境。用新鲜的眼光看地图。以全新的眼光看待任何地图。
The Americans have held all these reckonings in abeyance since 1945. Now remove the American security environment. Look at the map with fresh eyes. Look at any map with fresh eyes.
其次，你必须相信某些治国方略的工具将永远不会被使用，尤其是军事工具。德国人、俄罗斯人、伊朗人和中国人不会使用武力将他们的意志强加于他们的邻里。那些拥有军事影响力的大国——我想到的是法国、英国、土耳其和日本——不会利用他们的能力来阻止他们机动性较差的竞争对手的行动。历史并不仅仅充斥着相反的例子。大多数历史是相反的。当然，从 1945 年到现在的历史除外。
Second, you must believe that certain tools of statecraft will remain firmly off the table, most notably military tools. That the Germans, Russians, Iranians, and Chinese will not use military force to impress their wills upon their neighborhoods. That powers with military reach—France, the United Kingdom, Turkey, and Japan come to mind—will not use their capacity to short-circuit the actions of their less mobile competitors. History isn’t simply littered with examples to the contrary. Most of history is the contrary. Except history from 1945 to the present, of course.
第三，要相信地区主导大国不会发生冲突。俄罗斯人和德国人、中国人和印度人、俄罗斯人和中国人、土耳其人和俄罗斯人、土耳其人和伊朗人，将永远意见一致。随便我能想到十个这方面的例子在 1945 年之前的仅仅一个世纪内就没有奏效。世界上的不满是取之不尽，用之不竭的。大多数情况下，这些申诉在 75年内都没有得到解决。 . . . 但仅仅是因为美国人改变了游戏规则。
Third, you must believe that the dominant regional powers will not come into conflict. That the Russians and Germans, the Chinese and Indians, the Russians and Chinese, the Turks and the Russians, the Turks and the Iranians, will always see eye to eye. Offhand I can think of ten examples of this not working out in just the single century before 1945. The world’s supply of grievances is inexhaustible. For the most part, those grievances have not been acted upon for seventy-five years. . . . but only because the Americans changed the rules of the game.
不管出了什么问题，长途运输都是即时的伤亡，因为长途运输不仅仅需要这个或那个地区的绝对和平；它需要所有地区的绝对和平。这种长途中断描述了能源、制造业和农业领域所有出货量的四分之三。
Regardless of what goes wrong, long-haul transport is an instant casualty, because long-haul transport doesn’t simply require absolute peace in this or that region; it requires absolute peace in all regions. Such long-haul disruption describes three-quarters of all shipments in energy, manufacturing, and agriculture.
风暴中的港口
Harbors in the Storm
乱七八糟的东西，是的，但它不会是一个所有人都反对所有人的世界。商业航运的“安全区”属于两大类之一。
Messy stuff, yes, but it won’t quite be a world of all-against-all. What “safe zones” there are for commercial shipping will fall into one of two general categories.
首先，地区超级大国建立地区和平，将其首选的安全定义强加于其理想的地理区域。日本将在东北亚这样做，其目的可能不是很隐蔽，就是让中国人崩溃。法国将在遥远的西欧占据主导地位，这让英国人和德国人非常不屑。土耳其将在东地中海肆虐，很可能与以色列结盟。美国将更新门罗主义，将西半球变成美国的游乐场。这些控制区是非正式的还是铁定的，是促进区域贸易还是阻止区域贸易，是仁慈的还是其他的，将取决于文化规范、经济需求、战略命令以及当地需求和机会。没有一种尺寸适合所有尺寸。
First, a regional superpower establishes a regional pax to impose its preferred definition of security upon its desired geography. Japan will do this in Northeast Asia, with the probably not very hidden goal of keeping the Chinese broken. France will predominate in far Western Europe, much to the Brits’ and Germans’ disdain. Turkey will run roughshod over the Eastern Mediterranean, likely in league with the Israelis. The United States will update the Monroe Doctrine and turn the Western Hemisphere into an invitation-only American playground. Whether such zones of control are informal or ironclad, enable regional trade or block it, or are benevolent or otherwise, will be determined by a mix of cultural norms, economic demands, strategic diktats, and local needs and opportunities. No one size fits all.
其次，一些国家集群将能够联合巡逻自己的国家。英国可能会与斯堪的纳维亚人合作制定区域秩序。德国将对中欧国家做同样的事情。东南亚人将与澳大利亚人和新西兰人汇集经济实力和军事力量。
Second, some clusters of countries will be able to jointly patrol their own. The United Kingdom is likely to partner with the Scandinavians to craft a regional order. Germany will do the same with the Central European states. The Southeast Asians will pool economic strength and military forces with the Australians and New Zealanders.
地区超级大国和集团之间的冲突已成定局，但这并不等于说这种冲突将是长期的或动态的。法国人和土耳其人肯定会从地中海的两端互相瞪视，正如法国人和德国人肯定会在比利时以外的范围内找到合作的话题。荷兰人和丹麦人将在英国和德国领导的集团中寻求某种双重成员资格，而这两个集团本身可能会合作反对俄罗斯的力量。每个人都喜欢澳大利亚人。. . 但澳大利亚人会愉快地充当美国锤子的观察员。
Conflict among the regional superpowers and blocs is a foregone conclusion, but that isn’t the same as saying such conflicts will be chronic or kinetic. The French and the Turks will surely glare at one another from opposite ends of the Mediterranean, just as the French and Germans will surely find topics to cooperate on that reach beyond Belgium. The Dutch and Danes will seek a sort of dual membership in the British- and German-led blocs, while those two blocs themselves are likely to cooperate against Russian power. Everybody loves the Australians . . . but the Australians will merrily act as a spotter for the American hammer.
新时代的显着特征是，我们将不再站在同一边。尽管许多人可能会合理地争辩说情况一直如此，但令该命令奏效的是我们所有人都一致认为，州内竞争的形式是有限的。没有人会使用军事力量来对抗经济竞争对手。但最重要的是，没有人会攻击或劫持商业航运。时期。
The defining characteristic of the new era is that we will no longer all be on the same side. And while many might reasonably argue such has always been the case, what made the Order work is that we all collectively agreed that there were limits as to what form intrastate competition could take. No one uses military force to confront an economic competitor. But most important, no one shoots at or hijacks commercial shipping. Period.
这种规范的终结使我们走上了许多黑暗的道路。
The end of this norm takes us down a lot of dark paths.
长途运输的日子基本结束了。除了日本和美国这两个明显的例外，没有哪个国家能够始终如一地将海军力量投射到一个大陆以外的地方，即使对于世界前两大海军强国来说，在足够宽的海域巡逻以实现无护航货物贸易也是他们无法做到的。该命令之所以奏效，是因为只有美国拥有一支全球海军，而且每个人都同意不以船只为目标。那个世界消失了。
The days of long-haul transport are largely over. With the notable exceptions of Japan and the United States, no country can consistently project naval forces a continent away, and even for the world’s top two naval powers, patrolling sufficiently wide swaths of ocean to enable escort-free cargo trade is beyond them. The Order worked because only the United States had a global navy and everyone agreed to not target ships. That world is gone.
无论参与者如何，长途运输都能将一切从高供应地区带到高需求地区。对于任何在供应或需求方面集中的产品，预计市场会崩溃。供应特别集中的产品包括石油、大豆、锂和中低端微处理器。需求特别集中的产品有液化天然气、铝土矿、高铁车厢、鱿鱼等。面临双重挤压的产品包括铁矿石、氦气、可可豆和打印机碳粉。
Long-haul transport is what brings everything from areas of high supply to high demand, regardless of participant. For any product that is concentrated in terms of supply or demand, expect market collapse. Products particularly concentrated in terms of supply include oil, soy, lithium, and mid- and low-end microprocessors. Products particularly concentrated in terms of demand include liquefied natural gas, bauxite, high-speed train cars, and squid. Products facing a double squeeze include iron ore, helium, cocoa beans, and printer toner.
打破相互关联的世界所带来的规模经济和供应线将影响到每个人，但分崩离析也会对每个人产生不同的影响。西半球适合生产食品和能源，但需要增强其笔记本电脑和鞋子等种类繁多的产品的制造能力。德国集团的制造能力主要在内部，但完全没有使其能够运作的原始投入。日本人和中国人将不得不走出去，以确保粮食、能源、原材料和市场的安全。日本喜欢在销售产品的地方制造产品，这是一件好事，并拥有一支强大的远程海军。不幸的是，即使在和平时代，中国海军的大部分也无法越过越南。
Breaking the economies of scale and supply lines that an interlinked world makes possible will impact everyone, but the unravelling will also impact everyone differently. The Western Hemisphere is fine for foodstuffs and energy but will need to build out its manufacturing capacity for products as wildly varied as laptops and shoes. The German bloc’s manufacturing capacity is largely in-house, but the raw inputs that enable it to operate are wholly absent. The Japanese and Chinese are going to have to head out to secure food and energy and raw materials and markets. It’s a good thing that Japan likes to manufacture products where it sells them, and fields a potent long-reach navy. It’s a bad thing that most of China’s navy can’t make it past Vietnam, even in an era of peace.
每个区域集团决定的优先运输确实很重要，因此在任何一天都应得到优先保护。复杂的制造系统在拥有更多参与者时效率最高，这既适用于更大的消费者群体，也适用于差异化程度更高（由此产生的效率更高）的供应链系统。集团越大，区域制造业就越成功和可持续。俄罗斯人肯定会利用一个分裂的世界来对付他们的石油和天然气客户，这一特征将促使德国人、土耳其人、英国人、日本人和中国人从其他地方获取能源，因此在各地引发和激化竞争。具有讽刺意味的是，在一个支离破碎的世界中，最慢的船只——那些乏味的散货船——很可能最终成为最重要的。毕竟，如果集装箱运输出现故障，世界大部分地区的经济都将因制造业崩溃而遭受重创。但是，如果运输食品和燃料的散货运输出现故障，世界上许多人将挨饿。独自的。在黑暗中。
And it really matters what each regional bloc decides is priority shipping and so deserves priority protection on any given day. Complex manufacturing systems are most efficient when they have more players, both for a larger consumer pool and a more differentiated—and from that, more efficient—supply chain system. The bigger the bloc, the more successful and sustainable regional manufacturing is likely to be. The Russians are certain to leverage a fractured world against their oil and natural gas customers, a feature that will prompt the Germans and Turks and Brits and Japanese and Chinese to source energy from elsewhere and so initiate and inflame competition all around. Somewhat ironically, in a fractured world the slowest ships—those boring bulkers—are likely to end up being the most important. After all, should containerized shipping break down, much of the world will be economically decimated from the collapse in manufacturing. But should bulk shipping—which transports food and fuel—break down, many of the world’s people will starve. Alone. In the dark.
集团间针对航运的冲突将成为新常态，但请记住，大多数国家都缺乏长臂海军。这表明航运业真正令人兴奋的地方将发生在无人区，那里没有任何集团能够可靠地发挥影响力，也没有船只可以可靠地寻求援助。
Inter-bloc conflict over and against shipping will be the new norm, but keep in mind that most countries lack long-arm navies. That suggests the real excitement in shipping will occur in the no-man’s-lands where no bloc holds reliable sway—and where no vessel can reliably call for assistance.
在那种环境下，托运人将面临三重安全问题。
In that sort of environment, shippers will face a trifecta of security problems.
首先也是最明显的是海盗。*任何没有相当强大的当地海军力量的地区都几乎肯定会遭受索马里式的海盗骚扰。其次，不太明显的是私掠船，本质上是一个实际国家资助的海盗，用来骚扰他们的竞争对手，他们被授予寻求救助、燃料和船员（并出售他们的船员）的权利。*咳咳*战利品）在盟军港口。因为赞助私掠者至少可以做出否认的表象，所以是从全面战争中走出来的一步，所以期望几乎每个人都参与到那个特定的游戏中。
First and most obvious are the pirates.* Any zone without a reasonably potent local naval force is one that is all but certain to host Somalia-style pirate harassment. Second and less obvious are the privateers, in essence pirates sponsored by an actual country to harass their competitors, and who have been granted rights to seek succor, fuel, and crew (and sell their *ahem* booty) in allied ports. Because sponsoring privateers allows at least a veneer of deniability, and so is a step down from full-on war, expect pretty much everyone to get in on that particular game.
第三个安全问题不太可能局限于无人区：国家盗版。我们正在进入一个进口任何东西的能力——无论是铁矿石、柴油、化肥、电线还是消声器——都将受到严格限制的世界。简单地派遣你的海军从别人那里获取你需要的东西是一个古老的解决方案，它早于最近的哥伦布航行蓝色海洋的传奇故事。
The third security concern isn’t likely to be constrained to the no-man’s-lands: state piracy. We’re moving into a world where the ability to import anything—whether it be iron ore or diesel fuel or fertilizer or wire or mufflers—will be sharply circumscribed. Simply sending out your navy to take what you need from others is an age-old solution that long predates the relatively recent saga of Columbus sailing the ocean blue.
- 预计国家盗版将在土耳其集团以特别的活力重新流行起来，土耳其人（和以色列人）兴高采烈地（无情地）袭击任何绝望到试图通过苏伊士运河和东地中海运送原油的人支付安卡拉和耶路撒冷认为适当的任何级别的保护费。
- Expect state piracy to come back into vogue with particular verve in the Turkish bloc, with the Turks (and Israelis) gleefully (and relentlessly) raiding anyone desperate enough to attempt to ship crude oil through the Suez Canal and Eastern Mediterranean without first paying whatever level of protection money that Ankara and Jerusalem deem appropriate.
- 印度是另一个值得关注的大国，但方式略有不同。印度海军可能还差得远，但在印度洋范围内，它没有遇到地区同行。该次大陆也是从波斯湾运出的任何货物的第一站。潜在托运人别无选择，只能支付新德里坚持的任何“通行费”。对于这些托运人来说幸运的是，印度在付款方面可能非常灵活。印度极有可能接受直接原油转运付款，而该国庞大而复杂的炼油业务意味着它甚至可以在运送精炼燃料的同时吸收托运人的所有货物。
- India is another power to watch out for, but in a slightly different way. The Indian Navy may be, well, below awful, but within the Indian Ocean it faces no regional peer. The subcontinent is also the first stop for any shipments out of the Persian Gulf. Would-be shippers will have little choice but to pay whatever “passage” fees New Delhi insists upon. Luckily for those shippers, India is likely to be very flexible when it comes to payment. India is eminently likely to accept payment in direct crude transfers, while the country’s large and sophisticated refining operations means it could even absorb all of a shipper’s cargo while sending on refined fuels.
- 在航运受限的世界中，维持现代制造系统所需的投入——从高级硅到钴、镍、稀土到铝土矿的一长串材料——将成为首要目标。抓住那些缓慢移动的散货船比占领一个国家的采矿能力要容易得多。非洲和东南亚的海岸可能特别疯狂，不仅因为许多必要的材料都来自或经过这些地区，而且因为这两个地区都没有本土力量具有阻止海盗活动的海军能力——尤其是国家盗版——在海湾。
- In a world of circumscribed shipping, the inputs needed to maintain modern manufacturing systems—a long list of materials that range from high-grade silicon to cobalt to nickel to rare earths to bauxite—are going to be top-tier targets. It’s far easier to nab those slow-moving bulk ships than to occupy a country for its mining capacity. The coasts of Africa and Southeast Asia are likely to be particularly nuts not just because many of the requisite materials are sourced in or pass through these areas, but because there are no powers indigenous to either region with the naval capacity to keep piracy—especially state piracy—at bay.
- 整个东半球是一个粮食净进口地区，亚洲东部和西南部边缘地区的失衡最为严重。期待日本人发现，从西半球到亚洲大陆的食品运输的“监管”既是大生意，也是极好的战略杠杆。
- The Eastern Hemisphere as a whole is a net food importer, with the imbalance being most extreme on Asia’s eastern and southwestern fringes. Expect the Japanese to discover that the “regulation” of food shipments from the Western Hemisphere to the Asian mainland is both big business and excellent strategic leverage.
- 不要忘记美国人。美国的秩序后外交政策将是反复无常的，但仅仅因为美国人在全球的利益很少，并不意味着他们有任何放弃其全球影响力的打算。期望海军和海军陆战队都被分配到一系列次要任务，其中包括积极的制裁执行。也许所有国家和公司都必须适应的最不和谐的问题是，美国人不仅放弃了他们作为全球秩序保障者的角色，而且转变为活跃的混乱代理人。
- Do not forget the Americans. America’s post-Order foreign policy will be erratic, but just because the Americans have precious few global interests does not mean they have any intention of giving up their global reach. Expect the Navy and Marines both to be assigned a set of secondary tasks that include aggressive sanctions enforcement. Perhaps the most jarring issue all countries and companies must adapt to is the Americans not simply giving up their role as the global guarantor of order, but transforming into active agents of disorder.
自 1946 年以来我们对交通的一切期望都在这个世界上消亡了。更大、更慢、更专业的船只对于恰好在该地区的任何私掠者或海盗（国家或其他国家）而言，只不过是美味的漂浮自助餐。更大的船只可能会在一个统一的、低威胁的世界中最大限度地提高效率，但在一个支离破碎、高威胁的环境中，它们也会集中风险。
Everything we’ve come to expect about transport since 1946 dies in this world. Bigger, slower, more specialized vessels are little more than tasty floating buffets for whatever privateer or pirate (state or otherwise) happens to be in the area. Larger vessels might maximize efficiency in a unified, low-threat world, but in a fractured, high-threat environment they also concentrate risk.
下一代船只将与其体积小得多的 1945 年前的祖先有更多的共同点。这样的船只必然会缩短航程并能够运载更少的货物，这不仅仅是因为它们更小，而且因为它们每单位货物需要更多的燃料才能航行得更快。它们还需要设计成货物不需要存放在甲板上。毕竟，如果海盗或私掠者能够从远处识别出船型，整个劫持过程就可以更有针对性。仅这一特点就使集装箱船的载货量减少了三分之二。告别依赖海洋的集成制造供应链。
The next generation of vessels will have far more in common with their far smaller, pre-1945 ancestors. Such ships by necessity will be shorter range and be able to carry less cargo, not simply because they are smaller, but because they will need more fuel per unit of cargo in order to sail faster. They will also need to be designed so that cargo need not be stored on their decks. After all, if a pirate or privateer can identify ship type from a distance, the whole hijacking process can be more targeted. That feature alone shrinks the cargo capacity of container ships by two-thirds. Say goodbye to sea-dependent integrated manufacturing supply chains.
这种转变，即使与安全环境的变化无关，也揭示了即将结束的时代的经济规范。
This transformation, even independent of the changes to the security environment, unravels the economic norms of the age now ending.
现代港口——尤其是现代巨型港口——只能充当不再航行的巨型船舶的中转和配送中心。这将降低集装箱化的普及，并有必要回到更靠近消费点的更多、更小港口的结构。更安全？当然。但成本也更高。在船舶和港口的变化之间，预计剩下的运输成本至少是我们已经习惯的成本的四倍。这就是在安全或多或少得到保证的未来集团内。最大的赢家？那些进入工业时代的地方之所以有效，是因为它们的内部地理环境充满了可通航的水道以及与威胁保持一定的距离：美国、英国、日本、法国、土耳其和阿根廷，依次为。
Modern ports—and especially modern megaports—can only function as transit and distribution hubs for megaships that will no longer be sailing. That will decrease the popularity of containerization and necessitate a return to the structure of more, smaller ports closer to consumption points. More secure? Certainly. But also more costly. Between the changes to ships and ports, expect what transport remains to cost at least quadruple what we’ve become used to. And that’s within the future blocs where security is more or less guaranteed. The biggest winners? Those locations that entered the Industrial Age in force because they had internal geographies brimming with navigable waterways as well as a degree of stand-off distance from threats: the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Turkey, and Argentina, in that order.
更糟糕的是，随着运输成本的上升，低利润的非能源和非食品商品本来就不太可能被运输。这不仅进一步削弱了仍然具有约束力的经济联系；这也意味着运输的任何东西都更有可能是石油、可食用或其他有价值的东西。如果它在船上那么它值得采取的糟糕日子是返回。最大的输家？那些处于非常暴露的航线末端的国家，它们缺乏海军能力为自己的商船护航：韩国、波兰、中国、德国、台湾、伊朗和伊拉克，也是如此。
Even worse, as transport costs rise, low-margin non-energy and nonfood goods are less likely to be shipped in the first place. Not only does this further weaken what economic ties still bind; it also means that anything that is shipped is more likely to be oil or edible or otherwise valuable. The bad ol’ days of if-it’s-in-a-ship-then-it’s-worth-taking are returning. The biggest losers? Those countries at the very end of very exposed shipping routes, which lack the naval capacity to convoy their own merchant vessels: Korea, Poland, China, Germany, Taiwan, Iran, and Iraq, also in that order.
如果托运人不能指望良好的安全环境，并且如果托运人确信货物必须到达目的地，那么唯一合理的决定就是确保船舶有能力照顾好自己。. . 通过武装它。当这种决策在 17 和 18 世纪成为常态时，会产生大量不健康的草图，当时舰船机动军事技术的高度是火枪和大炮。现在加入导弹。还有无人机。还有无人机发射的导弹。重返军事化商船时代已经不远了。你认为全世界的人都对一些国家现在对他们的军事出口没有限制感到紧张吗？想象一下，当韩国人、以色列人或法国人开始销售设计用于安装在印度、沙特阿拉伯或埃及运营的散货船上的防傻反舰武器时会发生什么。
If shippers cannot count on a benign security environment, and if shippers have convinced themselves that a cargo must make it to a destination, then the only reasonable decision is to ensure that the ship has the capacity to look after itself . . . by arming it. Such decision making generated an unhealthy amount of sketch when it was the norm in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the height of ship-mobile military tech was muskets and cannon. Now add in missiles. And drones. And missiles fired from drones. A return to the days of militarized merchant marines is not far off. You think folks the world over are nervous about some countries having no restrictions on their military exports now? Just imagine what happens when the Koreans or Israelis or French start selling idiot-proof anti-ship weaponry designed to be mounted on bulkers operated by India or Saudi Arabia or Egypt.
现代制造业——尤其是现代科技制造业——只能在一个无数中间产品可以无摩擦地穿梭的世界中发挥作用。只有制造业供应可以与制造业需求共处一地的集团才不会遭受灾难性的破坏。这对德国制造业来说是一个大问题，因为它的许多供应商都来自地平线之外，而且大约一半的客户甚至不在欧洲。
Modern manufacturing—and especially modern tech manufacturing—can only function in a world in which gajillions of intermediate products can frictionlessly scuttle about. Only blocs in which manufacturing supply can be colocated with manufacturing demand won’t suffer from catastrophic disruption. That’s a massive problem for German manufacturing, as many of its suppliers are from beyond the horizon and roughly half of its customers aren’t even in Europe.
对于亚洲制造业来说，这是一个更大的问题，因为所有中间产品都通过海运（德国至少可以在其供应链合作伙伴中使用铁路运输中间产品），而且大多数原材料和终端市场都在数千英里之外. 尤其是中国，其制造系统中几乎所有的高附加值组件都依赖于远隔一个大陆或与之有着沉重历史或地缘政治仇恨的国家。随着运输成本的急剧上升，制造供应系统中将面临最大破坏的部分是那些依赖低成本的低利润部分。. . 比如便宜的交通工具。
It’s a much bigger problem for Asian manufacturing, where all intermediate products travel by sea (Germany can at least rail intermediate products among its supply chain partners), and most all of the raw materials and end markets are a multi-thousand-mile sail away. China, in particular, is dependent upon countries either a continent away or with which it nurses heavy historical or geopolitical grudges, for nearly all of the high-value-added components in its manufacturing system. With transport costs rising sharply, the portion of the manufacturing supply system that will face the greatest disruption is those low-margin pieces that rely upon low costs . . . such as cheap transport.
未来安全环境的流动性无济于事。支持多步骤供应链所需的工业厂房根据定义存在于多个地点，并且需要数年时间才能建成。每次对需求概况进行调整时——无论是针对中间产品还是成品——通常都需要一年的重组努力才能在系统中前进和后退。我们通过 COVID 艰难地吸取了这一小教训。每一艘转移的船只，每一次开火都会扰乱部分补给，并迫使同年的重置。在这样的环境中，任何地区的多步骤供应链都没有坚如磐石的本地安全和坚如磐石的本地消费没有多大意义。这些供应链必须集中在越来越紧密的地理区域，其中大多数需要完全在特定国家内部。其他任何事情都意味着持续的不匹配，并且没有最终产品。
The sheer fluidity of the future security environment won’t help. The industrial plant required to support multi-step supply chains exists in multiple locations by definition, and takes years to build. Every time there’s a tweak to a demand profile—either for intermediate or finished goods—it typically takes a year of retooling efforts to work its way forward and back through the system. We have learned that little lesson the hard way with COVID. Every ship diverted, every shot fired disrupts some part of the supply and forces that same year-long reset. In such an environment, multi-step supply chains in any region without rock-solid local security and rock-solid local consumption just don’t make much sense. Those supply chains must be concentrated into tighter and tighter geographies, with most needing to become fully internal to specific countries. Anything else spells persistent mismatches, and no end products.
现代城市——尤其是东亚的现代特大城市——尤其混乱。所有这些之所以存在，是因为订单使他们既可以轻松地采购工业化系统的构建块，也可以轻松进入终端市场进行出口。取消全球系统，取消全球运输，城市将负责自己的食品、能源和工业投入。
Modern cities—and especially East Asia’s modern megacities—are particularly screwed. All only exist because the Order has made it easy for them both to source the building blocks of industrialized systems as well as to access end markets for their exports. Remove the global system, remove global transport, and cities will be responsible for their own food and energy and industrial inputs.
也就是说，一句话，不可能。只有属于具有足够影响力的集团的城市才有希望让人口保持就业、食物和温暖。对于全球大多数城市人口来说，这导致了同一个地方：大规模去工业化和人口减少，因为人们被迫返回农村。城市集团越大，灾难性失败的风险就越大。全球至少有一半人口面临数十年城市化进程的退化。
That is, in a word, impossible. Only cities that are part of a bloc with sufficient reach can hope to keep populations employed, fed, and warm. For most of the global urban population, this leads to the same place: massive deindustrialization and depopulation as people are forced to return to the countryside. The bigger the urban conglomerate, the greater the risk of catastrophic failure. At least half the global population faces the unwinding of decades of urbanization.
那么，本章的最后一个问题是：城市在哪些地区仍可以利用启用现代功能所需的土地？
So, one final question for this chapter: where are the areas where cities can still tap the lands required to enable modern functionality?
美洲大体上还可以。部分是地理上的。这两个美洲大陆拥有的食物和能源比它们消耗的人口还要多。所以，你知道，坚实的开始。
The Americas are broadly okay. In part it is geographic. The two American continents have more food and energy than they have people to consume them. So, you know, solid start.
这也是经济的。西半球（世界上）人口最稳定的发展中国家——墨西哥——已经与西半球（世界上）最大的经济体和最人口稳定的发达国家——美国。这两者以现代世界无可比拟的方式相互支撑。
It is also economic. The Western Hemisphere’s (the world’s) most demographically stable developing country—Mexico—is already heavily integrated with the hemisphere’s (the world’s) largest economy and most demographically stable developed power—the United States. The two buttress one another in ways unparalleled in the modern world.
这也是地缘政治的。美国人有兴趣也有能力防止东半球的诡计蔓延到西半球。出于所有意图和目的，美国人可能正在放弃全球秩序（大O），但他们仍将维护西半球秩序（小 o）。
It is also geopolitical. The Americans have the interest and the ability to prevent Eastern Hemispheric chicanery from bleeding into the Western Hemisphere. For all intents and purposes, the Americans may be abandoning the global Order (big O), but they will still uphold a Western Hemispheric order (little o).
老实说，这可能比美国人实际需要做的更多。美国是一个内部商业活动活跃的大陆经济体，而不是一个对外贸易活跃的全球经济体。美国只有一半的国际贸易和不到 3% 的国内贸易（合计仅占 GDP 的 10%）是浮动的。大多数与墨西哥和加拿大的贸易是通过铁路、卡车或管道进行的。美国人的食品供应、能源供应、内部甚至大部分依赖国际的供应链都不依赖国际海上贸易。
Honestly, that’s probably more than what the Americans actually need to do. The United States is a continental economy with robust internal commercial activity, as opposed to a global economy with robust external trade. Only half of America’s international trade and less than 3 percent of its domestic trade—which collectively accounts for just 10 percent of GDP—floats at all. Most trade with Mexico and Canada is carried out via rail, truck, or pipeline. The Americans are not dependent upon international maritime trade for their food supply, their energy supply, or their internal or even the bulk of their internationally dependent supply chains.
即使是位于加利福尼亚州洛杉矶/长滩的美国唯一一个全球繁忙的港口，也是独一无二的。与首先是转运中心的亚洲和欧洲港口不同，洛杉矶/长滩是目的港。它不处理大量的中间产品，而是作为在别处制造和组装的大部分成品的最终停靠港。这些货物被装上卡车和铁路，在美国各地进行配送。供应中断当然仍然会产生后果，但不会是那种将成为整个欧亚大陆大部分地区常态的破坏系统的后果。
Even America’s single globally busy port, at Los Angeles/Long Beach, California, is unique. Unlike the Asian and European ports, which are first and foremost transshipment centers, Los Angeles/Long Beach is a destination port. It does not process scads of intermediate products, but instead serves as the final port of call for largely finished goods that are built and assembled elsewhere. Such goods are loaded onto truck and rail for distribution throughout the United States. Supply interruption certainly still has consequences, but not the sort of system-shattering ones that will become the norm throughout the bulk of Eurasia.
可以“聚集”以帮助城市生存的全球第二大区域是澳大利亚大陆和新西兰岛屿。与西半球一样，这两个西南太平洋国家拥有的资源和食品远多于它们的消费能力。正如墨西哥和美国现在拥有相互加强的关系一样，澳大利亚和新西兰也将与东南亚国家建立起一种相互促进的关系。
The second-largest piece of the globe that can be “gathered” to help cities survive is the continent of Australia plus the islands of New Zealand. Like the Western Hemisphere, the pair of southwest Pacific nations have far more resources and foodstuffs than they could ever consume. And just as Mexico and the United States now boast a mutually reinforcing relationship, so too will the Aussies and Kiwis enjoy one with the countries of Southeast Asia.
东南亚国家在财富水平和技术成熟度方面包罗万象，从超级技术官僚的新加坡到近乎工业化前的缅甸。从大多数观点来看，这种多样化是一种特性，而不是缺陷。它使多步骤制造系统能够在区域范围内发生，而无需过多地挖掘任何其他东西。加上欧盟内部合理水平的食品和能源供应，加上澳大利亚和新西兰的援助，这个地区应该能够勉强维持下去。
The Southeast Asian nations run the gamut in terms of levels of wealth and technical sophistication, from hypertechnocratic Singapore, to nearly preindustrial Myanmar. From most points of view, such diversification is a feature, not a bug. It enables multi-step manufacturing systems to occur regionally, without overly needing to tap anything beyond. Add in reasonable levels of food and energy supply within the bloc, balanced out by Australian and New Zealander assistance, and this region should be able to squeak by.
这个东南亚集团的问题在于 (a) 没有人是大人物和负责人，以及 (b) 该集团缺乏照顾其不同利益的军事能力。这不一定会以灾难告终，也不太可能。美国人和日本人都有理由寻求与东南亚国家（包括澳大利亚和新西兰）的经济和战略伙伴关系。关系所有三个方面的诀窍是使日本和美国的观点大致保持一致。严重的争吵对国际日期变更线以西的任何人来说都是毁灭性的。
The problem for this Southeast Asian bloc is that (a) no one is large and in charge, and (b) the group lacks the military capacity to look out for its varied interests. This need not end in disaster, nor is it likely to. Both the Americans and the Japanese will have reason to seek economic and strategic partnerships with the Southeast Asians (including the Aussies and Kiwis). The trick for all three sides of the relationship will be to keep Japanese and American views in rough alignment. A serious falling-out would be devastating to anyone west of the International Date Line.
在那之后，事情很快就会变得危险起来。
After that, things get dicey pretty quick.
俄罗斯有很多国家需要的东西，但克里姆林宫长期以来一直利用其资源财富从其客户那里榨取地缘政治让步。俄罗斯的经济战略政策可以最好地概括为。. . 失败的。在冷战前的时代，战略在俄罗斯征服上述客户和上述客户全面入侵俄罗斯之间摇摆不定。在冷战和后冷战时代，全球准入很容易，来自其他供应商的竞争使这一战略成为一纸空文。今天的俄罗斯人认为，他们的西伯利亚大铁路 (TSR) 理论上能够在东亚和欧洲之间运输大量货物，是打破美国对海上控制的绝佳方式。
Russia has loads of stuff that countries need, but the Kremlin has long used its resource wealth to extract geopolitical concessions out of its customers. Russia’s economic strategic policy can best be summed up as . . . failed. In the pre–Cold War eras, the strategy oscillated between Russian subjugation of said customers and said customers flat-out invading Russia. In the Cold War and post–Cold War eras of easy global access, competition from other suppliers made this strategy a dead letter. The Russians today think that their Trans-Siberian Railway (TSR), theoretically capable of transporting massive volumes of goods between East Asia and Europe, is an excellent way to break America’s hold on the seas.
现实并不同意：在整个 2019 日历年，这些大型集装箱船中有一艘运输的货物比年度TSR 总运输量还多。底线：我个人长期以来一直觉得俄罗斯的困惑很有趣，因为他们使用的是 1800 年代的剧本，但一直失败他们在二十一世纪。不是俄罗斯的战略最终奏效，而是期待历史早期的重演，可能会出现原子并发症。
Reality disagrees: a single one of those large container ships transported more cargo than total annual TSR traffic in the entirety of calendar year 2019. Bottom line: I’ve personally long found Russian confusion amusing given their use of an 1800s playbook that has consistently failed them in the twenty-first century. Rather than the Russian strategies finally working, instead expect a reprise from the earlier periods of history, potentially with atomic complications.
中东拥有丰富的能源，但超过三分之二的粮食需求依赖进口。预计大量和速射人口。. .随着全球大宗商品贸易以及其他一切的崩溃而进行调整。在此之后，法国和土耳其将享用该地区的丰富资源来满足他们自己的需求和野心，也许日本人会客串一下。希望这三个人都能像美国人一样享受他们在该地区的时光。
The Middle East is packed with energy but imports more than two-thirds of its food needs. Expect massive and rapid-fire population . . . adjustments as global commodities trade craters along with everything else. In the aftermath, France and Turkey will feast on the region’s bounty to fuel their own needs and ambitions, perhaps with the Japanese making the odd guest appearance. Expect all three to enjoy their time in the region as much as the Americans did.
撒哈拉以南非洲仍然是世界上最后的贸易前沿。在许多方面，它面临着与中东类似的限制。它已经部分工业化——包括粮食生产的扩张——如果没有持续的全球参与，它就无法保持其发展水平。它在许多方面反映了西半球的富饶——其工业化水平低意味着它拥有的工业商品远远多于它所能使用的。. . 这将吸引外来者。
Sub-Saharan Africa remains the world’s last frontier for trade. In many ways it faces similar constraints as the Middle East. It has partially industrialized—up to and including expansions in food production—and it cannot maintain its level of development without ongoing global engagement. In many ways it reflects the bounty of the Western Hemisphere—its low level of industrialization means it has far more industrial commodities than it could ever use . . . and that will attract outsiders.
预计结果是对非洲的新争夺，但这不是1800 年代。撒哈拉以南非洲的工业化程度可能不如欧洲，但也并非完全未工业化。这一次，欧洲人将不会享受那种使帝国能够在武器和军队数量上享有巨大优势的技术失衡。这一次，非洲人能够而且将会反击到帝国式征服或占领根本站不住脚的程度。相反，欧洲人（主要是法国人和英国人）将需要与地方当局合作以获得他们需要的投入。局外人能以多快的速度克服自我并得出结论，将决定未来几十年非洲历史的风味和结构。
Expect a new scramble for Africa as a result, but this is not the 1800s. Sub-Saharan Africa may not be as industrialized as Europe, but neither is it fully unindustrialized. This time around the Europeans will not enjoy the sort of technological imbalances that enabled empires to enjoy massive advantages in weapons and troop numbers. This time the Africans can and will fight back to the degree that imperial-style conquerings or occupations are simply untenable. Instead, the Europeans (primarily the French and British) will need to partner with local authorities to access the inputs they need. How quickly the outsiders can get over themselves and come to that conclusion will determine the flavor and texture of African history for the next few decades.
到目前为止，在这种新的不平衡结构中，最大的输家是中国。
By far the biggest loser in this new dis-structure is China.
现代中国的一切——从产业结构到食品采购再到收入来源——都是美国领导的秩序的直接结果。除去美国人和中国，就失去了能源供应、制成品销售收入、首先进口原材料来制造这些制成品的能力，以及进口或种植自己的食物的能力。中国绝对面临着不亚于神话的规模的去工业化和去城市化。它几乎肯定会面临政治解体甚至非文明化。它是在已经分崩离析的人口结构的背景下这样做的。
Everything about modern China—from its industrial structure to its food sourcing to its income streams—is a direct outcome of the American-led Order. Remove the Americans and China loses energy access, income from manufactures sales, the ability to import the raw materials to make those manufactures in the first place, and the ability to either import or grow its own food. China absolutely faces deindustrialization and deurbanization on a scale that is nothing less than mythic. It almost certainly faces political disintegration and even de-civilization. And it does so against a backdrop of an already disintegrating demography.
中国所有事物的悬而未决的问题很简单：它会完全崩溃吗？或者中国的部分地区是否能够紧紧抓住它的手指甲，以至于外部势力可能会以他们将要对待的方式对待它。. . 撒哈拉以南非洲？如果后者成立，预计上海等一些沿海城市将展开合作。毕竟，与北京相比，中国南部沿海城市与外来者的互动历史要丰富得多——尤其是在诸如摆饭之类的小事上。
The outstanding question for all things Chinese is simple: Will it collapse completely? Or will portions of China be able to hold on by its fingernails so that outside powers might treat it in the same way that they will treat . . . sub-Saharan Africa? If the latter holds true, expect a few coastal cities such as Shanghai to collaborate. After all, the cities of China’s southern coast have a far richer history of interaction—especially when it comes to little things like putting food on tables—with outsiders than they do with Beijing.
深呼吸
DEEP BREATH
交通是将世界维系在一起的结缔组织，而且，如果有的话，你刚刚吸收的只是交通故事的开始。例如，所有类型的现代船舶都需要柴油。柴油需要机油。向世界供应石油需要秩序的稳定。认为在后秩序世界中，石油运输会以相同的数量和可靠性发生吗？您认为石油和柴油短缺会对运输产生什么样的影响？这一切都非常衔尾蛇。我还有另外五个部分，其中充满了惊喜雷区。
Transportation is the connective tissue that holds the world together, and, if anything, what you’ve just absorbed is only the beginning of the transport story. For example, modern ships of all types require diesel fuel. Diesel requires oil. Supplying oil to the world requires the stability of the Order. Think oil shipments are going to happen with the same volume and reliability in a post-Order world? What sort of impact do you think oil and diesel shortages will have on transport? It’s all very ouroboros. I have another five sections packed with minefields of surprises for you.
所以休息一下。也许小睡一下。喝一杯。当您准备就绪时，让我们来解决全球连通性问题的另一半。
So take a break. Maybe a nap. Get a drink. And when you are ready, let’s tackle the other half of the global connectivity question.
钱。
Money.
货币
Currencies
在人迹罕至的道路上航行
Navigating the Road Less Traveled
在撰写本文时，也就是2022年初，世界各国都经历了多次后冷战时代的金融危机和市场崩盘。如果您认为这是深层结构性问题的征兆，那您是对的。如果您认为这一切都非常不可持续，请再次正确！如果你不明白为什么中国人能发展得这么快，那你又走对了路。如果你担心美元崩溃。. . 你的想法还不够大。
At the time of this writing, in early 2022, every country in the world has experienced financial crises and market meltdowns multiple times in the post–Cold War era. If you think this is symptomatic of deep structural issues, you are right. If you think it’s all wildly unsustainable, right again! If you cannot fathom why the Chinese are able to develop so quickly, you are once again on the right track. And if you’re worrying about the collapse of the dollar . . . you’re not thinking nearly big enough.
这些棘手的问题是现代金融的故事。
These gnawing questions are the story of modern finance.
即使我们认为我们对这些问题的答案也不能令人满意。那种我们都在边走边编造财务的感觉在你的胃里？听听那种感觉。它是死的。金融规则不是在美国领导的秩序开始时发生了巨大变化，而是在之后的几年里发生了巨大变化。在 2020 年代，它们将再次变成我们从未见过的东西。
Even what answers we believe we have to these questions are unsatisfactory. That feeling you have in the pit of your stomach that we’re all making up finance as we go? Listen to that feeling. It is dead-on. The rules of finance changed drastically not at the beginning of the American-led Order, but in the years after. In the 2020s they will change again into something we have never seen before.
这将需要一些拆包。
This is going to require a bit of unpacking.
再一次，让我们从头开始。
Once again, let’s start at the beginning.
漫长的赚钱之路
THE LONG PATH TO MONEY
早在美元、英镑甚至埃及黄金出现之前，就没有真正的交易媒介。到了交易的时候，你不得不抱有希望，希望你的合作伙伴想要你多出来的任何东西，反之亦然。但即使欲望相符，也存在着一个挥之不去的价值问题。大号多少钱雪松木板值多少钱？你的货物值一篮子或两篮子铜矿石吗？今年和去年一样吗？我可以对一卷莎草纸感兴趣吗？以物易物的“市场”，就像它一样，移动了，在你到达展示你的货物之前，没有办法知道它移动了哪条路。
Long before the world of the American greenback or British pound or even Egyptian gold, there was no real medium of exchange. When it was time to trade, you had to hope against hope that your partners wanted whatever it was you had extra of, and vice versa. But even if desires matched, there was the nagging question of worth. How much is a large plank of cedar wood worth? Is your cargo worth one basket of copper ore or two? Is it the same this year as last? Can I interest you in a roll of papyrus? The barter “market,” such as it was, moved, and there was no way to know which way it had moved until after you arrived to present your goods.
考虑到古代世界各国人民之间的相互孤立，这不仅仅是一个主要问题。
Considering the mutual isolation among the peoples of the ancient world, that was more than a major problem.
埃及人的沙漠缓冲区是古代最好的天然屏障。埃及人的主要贸易路线是沿着尼罗河谷进入苏丹（又名努比亚），但人口稠密的埃及以南的尼罗河被急流（无法航行）和峡谷（无法顺流而下）所诅咒。商人不得不穿越开阔的沙漠。. . 在驯化骆驼之前的时代。这一切都让埃及人感到安全，但这也意味着他们很少出去购物。
The Egyptians’ desert buffers were the best natural barriers of the Ancient Age. The Egyptians’ primary trade route was up the Nile Valley into Sudan (aka Nubia), but the Nile south of populated Egypt was cursed with rapids (no sailing) as well as canyons (no following the river). Traders had to cross the open desert . . . in an era before the domestication of camels. This all made the Egyptians secure, but it also meant they didn’t get out much to shop.
我们对早期印度河文明的了解几乎不及我们对最早祖先的了解，但我们所知道的并不是漂亮的。最好的猜测是地震或洪水（或两者兼而有之）使印度河的路径一度向东南方向移动了几十英里，使洪泛平原上强大、独立的城邦突然变得又高又干。每个感染结核病的人都没有帮助。不管早期印度河文明的居民如何死去，只要他们在身边，他们就是黑暗中的光明。比撒哈拉沙漠更干燥的沙漠存在于他们的西部，即今天的巴基斯坦和伊朗俾路支省，而半相邻的恒河谷或兴都库什山麓的人们很晚才摆脱狩猎/采集经济。印度河可能不像尼罗河那样与世隔绝，但当时可能并没有这种感觉。
We don’t know nearly as much about the early Indus civilization as we do about our earliest forebears, but what we do know is not pretty. The best guess is that an earthquake or flood (or both) shifted the path of the Indus River a few dozen miles to the southeast at one point, leaving the mighty, independent city-states of the floodplain suddenly high and dry. Everyone contracting tuberculosis didn’t help. Regardless of how residents of the early Indus civilizations died, while they were around they were the light in the darkness. Deserts drier than the Sahara exist to their west in what is today Pakistani and Iranian Baluchistan, while peoples of the semi-adjacent Ganges Valley or the foothills of the Hindu Kush were late to emerge from hunter/gatherer economics. The Indus may not have been quite as isolated as the Nile, but it probably didn’t feel that way at the time.
这使得美索不达米亚人成为中间的人。
This left the Mesopotamians as the men in the middle.
与尼罗河和印度河系统不同，美索不达米亚需要贸易，因为它只有食物。木材、花岗岩和金属都需要进口。幸运的是，美索不达米亚并没有简单地归入前三个创始文明同行中的另外两个，也归入它的文明女儿：安纳托利亚（今天的土耳其）、扎格罗斯山脉（今天的伊朗）、黎凡特（今天的以色列、黎巴嫩、叙利亚） , 和乔丹), 和波斯湾的沿海社区。美索不达米亚处于这一切的中心。由于美索不达米亚人从未参与建造印度河城市那种庞大的城市基础设施*或埃及人无处不在的虚荣项目* ，他们可以专注于产生越来越多的大麦盈余用于贸易。
Unlike the Nile and Indus systems, Mesopotamia needed to trade because it only had food. Lumber, granite, and metals all required import. Luckily, Mesopotamia wasn’t simply bracketed by the other two of the First Three founding civilizational peers, but also by its civilizational daughters: Anatolia (today’s Turkey), the Zagros Mountains (today’s Iran), the Levant (today’s Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan), and the coastal communities of the Persian Gulf. Mesopotamia was at the center of it all. And since the Mesopotamians never got into building out the sorts of sprawling urban infrastructure of the Indus cities* or the omnipresent vanity projects of the Egyptians,* they could focus on generating ever-greater barley surpluses for use in trade.
大麦？两千年来，大麦一直是交易货币。为什么？
Barley? Barley was the currency of exchange for more than two millennia. Why?
简单的。地点很重要。对一切。
Simple. Place matters. To everything.
所有前三个文明的早期灌溉系统都是由洪水驱动的。工人们会把季节性的泉水引到田里，淹没一切。由于前三个都在那些低海拔、低纬度的沙漠河谷中，蒸发效应将山区径流中的微量盐分集中到土壤中，导致土壤盐分含量逐年升高。大麦比其他植物更能耐受这种盐度。*它使大麦成为前三年流行的作物。
Early irrigation systems in all of the First Three civilizations were flood-driven. Workers would divert seasonal spring flows into fields and drown everything. As all of the First Three were in those low-altitude, low-latitude desert river valleys, evaporation effects concentrated the tiny amounts of salinity in the mountain runoff into the soil, resulting in incrementally higher soil-salt levels year on year. Barley could tolerate this salinity better than other plants.* It made barley a popular crop throughout the First Three.
现在我们有了价值的基础，问题就变成了运输。一夸脱大麦重约一磅。体积和重量的问题限制了它的实用性，特别是如果你的计划是在沙漠中运送几吨它。作为最需要和最有能力进行贸易的人，美索不达米亚人需要一种方法来扩大他们的大麦圈。
Now that we have our basis for value, the problem becomes transport. A quart of barley weighs about a pound. Issues of bulk and weight limited its usefulness, especially if your plan was to schlep a few tons of it across the desert. As the people with the greatest need for and ability to trade, the Mesopotamians needed a way to square their barley circle.
大约公元前 2000 年的解决方案是谢克尔。百分之三谢克尔可以换一夸脱大麦。一舍客勒等于 11 粒银子。随着时间的推移，谢克尔成为我们现代货币概念的代名词。一谢克尔可以支付一个工人一个月的工资。二十舍客勒给你买了一个奴隶。到公元前 1700 年，在汉谟拉比的帮助下，如果有人伤害了您，您可以选择以谢克尔而非眼球的形式进行赔偿。砰！金融诞生！
The circa 2000 BCE solution was the shekel. Three one-hundredths of a shekel could be traded for one quart of barley. One shekel was equal to 11 grains of silver. Over time the shekel became synonymous with our modern concept of money. One shekel could pay a laborer for a month. Twenty shekels bought you a slave. By 1700 BCE and courtesy of Hammurabi, if someone injured you, you had the option of choosing restitution in the form of shekels rather than eyeballs. Bam! Finance was born!
有了共同商定的交换媒介，劳动力专业化有了飞跃。现在，曾经的农民演变成其他任何人的风险要小得多。任何其他收入都可以以已知的比率换成大麦。毕竟，谢克尔实际上可以兑换食物。
Armed with a commonly agreed-upon medium of exchange, labor specialization took a leap forward. There was now far less risk for a once-farmer to evolve into an anything-else. Income from anything-else could be swapped for barley at a known rate. After all, the shekel was literally redeemable for food.
突破如此得心应手，谢克尔的使用广为流传。过去一百个人的良好数据可能很难获得，但美索不达米亚的所有事物在字面上和比喻上都如此重要，以至于埃及人和印度河流域文明的人们在这些罕见的情况下都采用了美索不达米亚谢克尔标准当他们从事跨区域贸易时。
So handy was the breakthrough, use of the shekel spread far and wide. Good data from a hundred human lifetimes in the past can be hard to come by, but so central—literally and figuratively—were all things Mesopotamian that even the Egyptians and the people of the Indus Valley Civilization adopted the Mesopotamian shekel standard on those rare occasions when they engaged in transregional trade.
它 。. . 在事情卡住之前花了一段时间。不仅仅是货币。文明也一样。
It . . . took a while before things stuck. Not just currency. Civilization, too.
前三个文明可以追溯到公元前第四或第三个千年的某个时间点，但它们只是故事的开始。与前三国相邻的部落会从文明贸易中学到一些技巧，并找到自己的回声文明。美索不达米亚启发了波斯人和赫梯人。埃及的扩张促进了努比亚和腓尼基的出现。印度河孕育了雅利安人的分支。*他们都没有真正持续下去，因为他们都没有祖先的那种至关重要的紧缩大衣沙漠防护。入侵者可以到达他们。对新手来说，降水比灌溉更重要，所以收成不好——而收成不好往往意味着所有人都死了。或者至少有足够多的人死亡或逃亡以破坏任何形式的文明进步。
The First Three civilizations date back to some point in the fourth or third millennium BCE, but they were only the beginning of the story. Tribes in lands adjacent to the First Three would pick up some tricks of the civilizational trade and found their own echo civilizations. Mesopotamia inspired the Persians and Hittites. The Egyptian expansions encouraged the emergence of Nubia and Phoenicia. The Indus birthed Aryan offshoots.* None of them really lasted because none of them had that all-important crunch-coat desert shielding of their forebears. Invaders could reach them. Precipitation for the newbies was more important than irrigation, so bad harvests happened—and bad harvests often meant everyone died. Or at least enough people died or fled to wreck any sort of civilizational progress.
尤其是从大约公元前 1600 年到公元前 800 年，这是一个文明混乱的时代。不仅仅是这些子文明兴衰起伏，有时整个区域的所有子文明都会一起衰落。中国经验丰富一些真正史诗般的崩溃。在这个时间窗内，有两次大规模的文明陨落非常严重，它们带走了美索不达米亚和印度河，印度河文明再也没有恢复过来。甚至永恒的埃及也在那里摇摇欲坠。考古学家将这段时间的一部分称为青铜时代晚期的崩溃。基督徒、犹太人和穆斯林都将其称为出埃及记时代。
The period from roughly 1600 BCE to 800 BCE in particular was an era of civilizational chaos. It wasn’t simply that these daughter civilizations rose and fell and rose and fell, but that at times all the daughter civilizations throughout an entire region would fall together. China experienced some truly epic collapses. Two of the mass civilizational falls in this time window were so severe they took Mesopotamia and the Indus with them, with Indus civilization never recovering. Even eternal Egypt teetered there for a bit. Archaeologists refer to a subset of this timeframe as the Late Bronze Age Collapse. Christians, Jews, and Muslims know it as the era of Exodus.
大约在公元前 7 世纪左右，文明和金融发生了三方面的变化。
Roughly around the seventh century BCE, three things changed—for both civilization and for finance.
首先，当一个文明没落时，很少有人会效仿印度河，让每个人、产品和想法从地球上彻底消失。公民成为幸存者。幸存者成为侨民。侨民混合并形成新的社区。混合的不仅仅是人，还有想法、产品和技术。人们需要一种交换媒介来润滑增加的变化。输入货币。
First, when a civilization falls, it’s rare to follow the example of the Indus and have every person, product, and idea utterly vanish from the Earth. Citizens become survivors. Survivors become diasporas. Diasporas intermingle and form new communities. It isn’t just people who mix but also ideas and products and techniques. People need a medium of exchange to lubricate the increased variation. Enter currency.
其次，这种崩溃后的融合自然而然地导致了技术的繁荣，这是由于各种重叠的侨民的技能混合，以及与堕落文化中的其他人重新建立联系的愿望。*更多的技术进步、更大的产品差异化以及更加外向的心态相结合，不仅赋予了我们更大的影响力、稳定性和人口，还促成了从青铜时代向铁器时代的转变。这种加速的技术轨道的一些成果是许多新的农业工具和技术，最终导致古典希腊的出现及其最重要的水车。人类文明在它面前仍然有很多颠簸和擦伤——挫折和恐怖，比如罗马的衰落、黑暗时代、电臀舞、2020 年美国总统辩论——但这种崩溃后的混合将技术极限向前推得足够远，人类再也不会遭受大规模坍塌事件。如果狼文明崩溃不再临近，你更愿意接受硬币而不是大麦。
Second, this post-collapse merging naturally led both to technical booms from the skill mixing of the various overlapping diasporas and the desire to reconnect with others in their fallen cultures.* The combination of more technological advancement, greater product differentiation, and a bit more outwardly focused mentality not only granted us greater heft and stability and populations, they contributed to the shift from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. Some outcomes of this accelerated technological track were any number of new agricultural tools and techniques, culminating in the emergence of classical Greece, with its all-important water wheels. Human civilization still had plenty of bumps and scrapes ahead of it—setbacks and horrors like the fall of Rome, the Dark Ages, twerking, the 2020 American presidential debate—but this post-collapse intermixing pushed the technical envelope sufficiently forward that humanity never again suffered a mass collapse event. And if the wolf of civilizational collapse is no longer at the door, you’re more willing to accept payment in coin as opposed to barley.
第三，随着稳定性和经济活力的稳步增长，贸易商更有信心，当他们返回时，他们想要与之交易或为之交易的城市、国家或帝国会在那里。历史上第一次出现了开发比大麦更好的货币的地缘政治理由。
Third, with both stability and economic dynamism steadily increasing, traders had more confidence that the city or country or empire they wanted to trade with or for would be there when they got back. For the first time in history there was a geopolitical rationale for developing a currency better than barley.
我们同时在多个地点开发了金属铸币作为一种交换方式：在中国、在印度、在东地中海。其余的，正如他们所说，是历史。不再是商品的过剩或短缺引发一连串令人困惑的随意易货交易，而是借助金属铸币，贸易一方的价值现在始终为人所知。气候、季节、文化、稀缺和充足的反复无常不再是阻碍经济活动的障碍，而是它的燃料。
All at once in multiple locations, we developed metal coinage as a method of exchange: in China, in India, in the Eastern Mediterranean. The rest, as they say, is history. Instead of surpluses or shortages of a good triggering a flurry of confusingly haphazard barter, courtesy of metal coinage the value of one side of the trade was now always known. The whims of climate and season and culture and scarcity and plenty were no longer obstacles that discouraged economic activity, but instead were its fuel.
建立信任
BUILDING TRUST
然而，从历史上看，人们很难认真对待这种或那种货币。通常，它只在一个非常特定的地区内被评估，由一个非常特定的政府统治。离开那个区域，外国硬币只不过是劣质镇纸。
Yet, historically speaking, people have had a hard time taking this or that currency seriously. As a rule it is only valued within a very specific area, ruled by a very specific government. Leave that area and foreign coin is little more than a low-quality paperweight.
有几种方法可以解决这个问题。第一个是用人们想要的东西来制作你的硬币。金、银、金和铜都是不错的选择，但实际上，任何一种文化认为有价值的东西都可以使用。多年来的选择包括大麦、铁条、可可豆、*海豚牙、土豆捣碎器、郁金香、帕尔马干酪轮，以及我个人最喜欢的海狸皮。*
There are a couple of ways around this. The first is to make your coin out of something that people want. Gold, silver, electrum, and copper are all good choices, but really, anything a culture deems valuable can be used. Options through the ages have included barley, strips of iron, cocoa beans,* dolphin teeth, potato mashers, tulips, wheels of Parmesan, and, my personal favorite, beaver pelts.*
这样的系统有一个非常小的缺点。一个穷人可能通过多年的劳动可以得到几个银币，但是一个富人将拥有成吨的东西。背着三百斤银子根本不实用，何况还是抢劫的对象。*
Such systems have one far-from-minor drawback. A poor person might be able to get a few silver coins over the course of years of labor, but a wealthy person will have literally tons of the stuff. Carrying three hundred pounds of silver simply isn’t practical, not to mention it makes you a robbery target.*
这就给我们带来了第二种选择：让你的公开流通货币可以兑换成有价值的东西。同样，高价值的金属是显而易见的选择；您只需将实际金属保存在政府金库中，而不是将价值存在于硬币本身中。四川盆地附近的富商——当代中国城市成都和重庆的所在地——在公元 7 世纪建立了这样一个系统，使用一种可以兑换白银的期票。
This brings us to the second option: make your publicly circulating currency exchangeable for something of value. Again, a metal of high worth is the obvious choice; you just keep the actual metal in a government vault instead of having the value reside in the coin itself. Wealthy merchants in the vicinity of the Sichuan Basin—home to the contemporary Chinese cities of Chengdu and Chongqing—started up a system like this in the seventh century, using a sort of promissory note that could be exchanged for silver.
这就是设置。看到问题了吗？你必须能够让人们相信你确实将有价值的东西藏在某个地方，而且真的可以按需交换。
So that’s the setup. See the problem? You have to be able to convince people that you really do have the stuff of value squirreled away somewhere, and it really can be exchanged on demand.
因国家做事不当、不当、不明智而引发的金融崩溃与天上的星星一样普遍。在不成功的系统中，政府常常发现自己被超出其能力的支出需求所困扰。诱惑是发行更多的货币而不同时获得更多的资产来支持它。技术术语是“贬值”。暂时有效。. . 直到人们不再相信政府的路线。
Financial collapses triggered by countries doing things unwell and unproperly and unwisely are as common as the stars in the sky. In unsuccessful systems, governments often find themselves beset with spending needs greater than their means. The temptation is to issue more currency without simultaneously securing more assets to back it. The technical term is “debasement.” That works for while . . . until people stop believing the government line.
一旦有关政府金库中有多少黄金（或帕尔马干酪）的消息泄露出去，人们就会停止接受官方货币付款，或者如果提供的都是垃圾现金，则完全拒绝服务。毕竟，货币关乎信任。缺乏信任是俄罗斯人长期以来习惯用卢布换取德国马克、英镑或美元并将这些更受尊重的货币塞进家具的部分原因。
As soon as word leaks out that you are lying about how much gold (or Parmesan) you have in that government vault, folks stop accepting payment in the official currency, or refuse services altogether if crap cash is all on offer. Currency, after all, is about trust. Such lack of trust is part of the reason why Russians have long had a habit of trading in their rubles for German marks or British pounds or U.S. dollars and stuffing such better-respected currencies into furniture.
一旦这种信任受到损害，你的货币流通量就会随着人们的抛售而飙升。由于供过于求，您的货币的相应价值随后暴跌。到那时，即使是真正重要的人也往往会失去信任。魁北克人曾经臭名昭著地用扑克牌支付他们的军队。*由于战时金属短缺，日本帝国发行纸板货币。*
Once that trust is damaged, the volume of your currency in circulation soars as people dump it. Your currency’s corresponding value then plummets due to oversupply. At that point, even really important people tend to lose trust. The Quebecois once infamously paid their troops with pieces of playing cards.* Imperial Japan issued cardboard currency due to wartime metal shortages.*
人们转向替代品，无论是被认为更可靠的实物资产，还是其他国家的货币。以物易物——尽管有其局限性——出于需要又重新流行起来。到那时，政府和民间的崩溃就在咫尺之遥，领导人发现自己手上拿着进入历史垃圾堆的入场券。
Folks shift to alternatives, whether it be a physical asset that is supposedly more solid, or even other countries’ currencies. Barter—with all its limitations—comes back into fashion out of necessity. At that point, governmental and civil collapse is rarely far off, with leaders finding themselves holding tickets for admission to history’s ash heap.
大多数人没有意识到的是，虽然糟糕的经济管理显然会导致货币崩溃，但良好的经济管理也会如此。
What most do not realize is that while bad economic management obviously culminates in currency collapses, so too does good economic management.
在一个成功的系统中，真实货币提供的稳定性会产生经济专业化和增长。经济专业化和增长需要越来越多的货币来润滑不断增长的经济活动。越来越多的货币需要越来越多的东西来支持货币。
In a successful system, the stability a real currency provides generates economic specialization and growth. Economic specialization and growth require ever-larger volumes of currency to lubricate ever-growing volumes of economic activity. Ever-larger volumes of currency necessitate ever-larger volumes of the stuff needed to back the currency.
获得如此大量的所说“东西”说起来容易做起来难。
Getting such ever-larger volumes of said “stuff” is far easier said than done.
罗马帝国就是一个很好的例子。
The Roman Empire is an excellent case in point.
帝国是迄今为止人类尚未发明的最稳定的政治实体。这种稳定性鼓励了罗马体系内的发展、技术进化和贸易。这需要更多的货币和更多的贵金属来支持货币。这种需要迫使罗马人将业务扩展到触手可及的领土之外，以及可以创造财富的领土之外，进入更远的土地，仅仅是为了获得矿产。
The empire was by far the most stable political entity humanity had yet to invent. That stability encouraged development and technological evolution and trade within the Roman system. That required more currency, and more precious metals to back the currency. That need forced the Romans to expand beyond territories within easy reach and beyond territories that could generate wealth into ever-farther-removed lands simply in order to secure mines.
一些这样的地方，比如伊比利亚半岛，触手可及并且很容易被安抚和整合。其他的，比如安纳托利亚南部的金牛座山脉，距离更远，需要与遥远而顽固的敌对势力进行数百年的较量。还有一些地区，例如构成当代萨赫勒国家马里的土地，是可以获取属于当代加纳和尼日利亚（曾经著名的“黄金海岸”）一部分的黄金资源的贸易中心。罗马人穿越撒哈拉沙漠并不是为了晒黑皮肤，而是因为他们必须这样做才能维持国内金融稳定。最终，罗马的扩张超出了其保卫领土的能力。一旦罗马人失去了进军（黄金的来源），帝国经济就会失灵，短期的政治稳定和长期的军事能力随之而来。
Some such locales, like the Iberian Peninsula, were within arm’s reach and were pacified and integrated fairly easily. Others, like the Taurus Mountains of southern Anatolia, were much farther away and required centuries of sparring with distant and stubbornly hostile powers. Still others, such as the lands that comprise the contemporary Sahelian country of Mali, were trading hubs that could access gold sources that are part of contemporary Ghana and Nigeria (the once-famed “Gold Coast”). The Romans didn’t cross the Sahara to get a tan, but because they had to if they were to maintain domestic financial stability. Ultimately Rome expanded beyond its ability to defend the realm. Once the Romans lost their marches (where the gold came from), the imperial economy seized up, taking short-term political stability and long-term military capacity with it.
也不需要在军团攻击地理区域时发生“冒险”。它可能发生在官僚攻击经济的情况下。一些政府没有吞并别人的资源，而是选择吞并邻近部门的资源。唐代走的就是这样一条垂直的道路。他们没有在实体上扩张帝国以采购更多的白银，而是扩大了“支持”其货币的金属清单，将铜包括在内。唐朝采用铜作为货币，成功地稳定了金融体系，但代价是造成帝国范围内的金属短缺，从而削弱了 . . . 其他一切。
Nor does “venturing forth” need to occur with legions assaulting geography. It can occur with bureaucrats assaulting economics. Rather than gobbling up someone else’s resources, some governments choose to gobble up their own from an adjacent sector. The Tang Dynasty followed such a perpendicular course. Rather than expanding the empire physically to source more silver, they instead expanded the list of metals that “backed” their currency to include copper. The Tang’s adoption of copper as currency succeeded at stabilizing the financial system, but at the cost of causing empire-wide metals shortages that enervated . . . everything else.
可以说，这种从胜利的嘴里抢走失败是整个人类历史上每一个表面上成功的货币制度的最终命运。包括最大和最成功的。
Such snatching of defeat from the jaws of victory, as it were, has been the ultimate fate of every ostensibly successful currency regime throughout human history. Including the biggest and most successful ones.
尤其是最大和最成功的。
Especially the biggest and most successful ones.
储备货币：大人物
RESERVE CURRENCIES: THE BIG BOYS
如果你正在寻找现代世界开始的地点和年份，那应该是 1545 年在玻利维亚高地的秘鲁总督辖区，当时 Diego Huallpa——一个为当地西班牙征服者从事相当于合同工作的当地人——真的被一阵强风吹倒了，掉进了一点松散的泥土里。Huallpa 站了起来刷掉污垢。. . 那真的是闪闪发光的银粉。在不到一年的时间里，这笔意外之财以波托西矿山的形式出现，这是人类六千年历史上发现的最大的单一银矿床。
If you are looking for the place and the year the modern world began, that would be in the Viceroyalty of Peru in the Bolivian highlands in 1545, when one Diego Huallpa—a native doing the equivalent of contract work for a local Spanish conquistador—was literally blown over by a strong gust and tumbled down into a bit of loose soil. Huallpa stood up and brushed off dirt . . . that was quite literally sparkling with silver dust. In under a year this windfall took physical form as the mines of Potosi, the largest single deposit of silver ever discovered in the six-millennia history of humanity.
只要我给你完整的治疗，让我先给你脏的。
As long as I’m giving you the full treatment, let me give you the dirty first.
银通常与铅共同生产，提取有毒。十六、十七世纪的净化方法使用的是水银，所以对你来说毒性更大一些。当时的采矿技术不是我们所说的 OSHA 批准的技术。他们包括背着几百磅的矿石，同时通过数百英尺的梯子爬出地心，唯一的灯是绑在额头上的蜡烛。
Silver is often co-produced with lead, making extraction toxic. Purification methods of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries used mercury, so there’s some more toxicity for you. Mining techniques of the time were not what we would call OSHA-approved. They included lugging a couple hundred pounds of ore on your back while climbing up out of the bowels of the earth via hundreds of feet of ladders with the only light being a candle strapped to your forehead.
没有人会为了这种工作而从西班牙移民过来，所以西班牙人经常掠夺土著人口作为劳动力。当时的西班牙法律表明，只要您为您的员工施洗，他们是否活着真的无关紧要。还有最后一个关于狗屎三明治的污点：波托西海拔一万三千英尺。在前工业时代，在海拔是犹他州帕克城两倍、降雨量只有一半的地方种植粮食，可以说是一项挑战。即使你幸免于难，你也很可能会饿死。
No one was going to emigrate from Spain for that sort of work, so the Spanish regularly raided indigenous populations for labor. Spanish law of the time indicated that so long as you baptized your workforce, it really didn’t matter if they lived. And one final schmear on the shit sandwich: Potosi is at thirteen thousand feet of elevation. In the preindustrial era, growing food in a place with double the elevation and half the rainfall of Park City, Utah, was, shall we say, challenging. Even if you survived everything else, you very well might starve.
西班牙帝国不是很好的会计师，但最好的猜测是大约有 400 万到 1200 万人在波托西银矿开采过程中死亡。（作为参考，1600 年旧西班牙的总人口只有 820 万。）
The Imperial Spanish weren’t very good accountants, but the best guess is that somewhere between four million and twelve million people died during the course of the Potosi silver operations. (For a point of reference, the entire population of Old Spain in 1600 was only 8.2 million.)
西班牙人并不在乎，因为他们是大个子。启动第一个真正的全球系统需要两件事。第一个是可以跨越多个大陆的单一经济和军事结构。第二个是足够多的贵金属来支撑全球货币。波托西资助了第一个，并提供了支持第二个的材料。在 16 和 17 世纪的几十年里，波托西生产的白银比世界其他地区生产的白银还要多。
The Spanish didn’t really care, because they were the big men. Launching the first truly global system required two things. The first was a single economic and military structure that could span multiple continents. The second was a large enough volume of precious metals to support a global currency. Potosi funded the first and provided the material to back the second. For several decades in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Potosi produced more silver than the rest of the world combined.
很快，西班牙人就不仅仅是在伊比利亚及其周边地区促进经济交流，而是在世界各地大肆抨击和攻击。盟友、合作伙伴、中立者，甚至竞争对手都开始使用西班牙“八枚”硬币作为他们的专属交换方式。葡萄牙帝国——西班牙的主要当代竞争对手——别无选择，只能在内部贸易中使用西班牙银币。*即使在西班牙晚期，也就是英国崛起的时期，西班牙硬币的数量仍然如此庞大，流通范围如此之广，而且纯度如此可靠，以至于在英属美洲使用得比英镑还多。西班牙货币在连接英国的美洲、加勒比海和非洲属地的朗姆酒-糖-奴隶三角地带特别受欢迎。
Very soon the Spanish were not simply lubricating economic exchange in and around Iberia, but kicking names and taking ass the world over. Allies, partners, neutrals, and even rivals started using the Spanish “pieces of eight” coins as their exclusive method of exchange. The Portuguese Empire—Spain’s premier contemporary rival—had no choice but to use Spanish silver currency in internal commerce.* Even in the late Spanish period, well into the British rise, Spanish coin remained so large in volume, so far-reaching in circulation, and so reliable in purity that it was used more in British America than the British pound. Spanish currency was especially popular in the rum-sugar-slave triangle linking Britain’s American, Caribbean, and African possessions.
但是所有的事情都会随着时间过去。
But all things pass in time.
对于任何其他拥有金属支持货币的人来说，西班牙硬币的永无休止的泛滥实际上是一场经济战争。对于任何被西班牙人认为在战略上有问题的人来说，西班牙硬币的永无休止的泛滥就是真正的战争。同样糟糕的是：当西班牙人用秘鲁的所有白银来吸纳资源、货物和工时时，结果总是一样的：通货膨胀失控不仅在西班牙，而且在任何可以为西班牙人提供他们想要的东西的地区都是如此. 考虑到当时的西班牙帝国是全球性的，几乎无处不在。控制波托西意味着西班牙人可以蒙混过关。其他地方，就更少了。
For anyone else who had a metals-backed currency, the perpetual flood of Spanish coin was de facto economic war. For anyone whom the Spanish found strategically problematic, the perpetual flood of Spanish coin was actual war. Just as bad: when the Spanish used all that Peruvian silver to hoover up resources and goods and man-hours, the result was always the same: runaway inflation not only in Spain, but in any territory that could supply the Spanish with what they wanted. Considering that Spain’s empire of the time was global, that was pretty much everywhere. Holding Potosi meant the Spanish could muddle through. The rest of everywhere, less so.
经过两个世纪的扩张、战争和通货膨胀，旧西班牙真正创造性的战略和经济管理不善，再加上拿破仑波拿巴入侵邻国的令人不安的习惯，导致了西班牙帝国和西班牙货币的整体衰落具体来说。1820 年代上半叶迎来了秘鲁和玻利维亚的独立，结束了西班牙人进入波托西的通道，并以残酷、冷漠的结局终结了西班牙帝国。
After two centuries of expansion and war and inflation, a mix of truly creative strategic and economic mismanagement in Old Spain, combined with Napoleon Bonaparte’s disturbing habit of invading his neighbors, resulted in both the fall of the Spanish Empire in general and of the Spanish currency in specific. The first half of the 1820s ushered in the independence of both Peru and Bolivia, ending Spanish access to Potosi and finishing off the Spanish Empire with brutal, uncaring finality.
但是全球贸易的可能性已经从瓶子里放出来了，没有什么像玻利维亚独立这样微不足道的事情会把那个精灵重新塞进去。
But the possibility of global trade had been let out of the bottle, and nothing as minor as Bolivian independence was going to stuff that genie back in.
随着西班牙人的衰落，英国人的崛起。早期的英国“磅”实际上是一磅重的银，但英国人没有自己的波托西，无论他们多么努力，他们也无法捕获足够多的西班牙宝藏大帆船来支持大量的货币供应。
As the Spanish were falling, the British were rising. The early British “pound” was quite literally a pound-weight of silver, but the Brits didn’t have a Potosi of their own, and no matter how hard they tried they couldn’t capture anywhere near enough Spanish treasure galleons to back a sizable currency supply.
艾萨克·牛顿爵士 (Sir Isaac Newton) 在负责皇家造币厂的三十年中，没有人找到解决这个问题的方法。他发起了一个多世纪的努力，在整个大英帝国开采黄金——最著名的是今天包括澳大利亚、加拿大、南非和非洲黄金海岸的领土——以非正式地建立一个与西班牙抗衡的力量。到 1800 年代中期，我们所熟知的以黄金为后盾的英镑应运而生。
None other than Sir Isaac Newton found a workaround to this problem during his thirty years in charge of the Royal Mint. He initiated a century-plus effort to tap the totality of the British Empire for gold—most notably the territories that today comprise Australia, Canada, South Africa, and Africa’s Gold Coast—to unofficially create a counterweight to Spain. By the mid-1800s the gold-backed pound we know had come into being.
到 1800 年代后期，英国对海洋的控制常常转化为贸易瓶颈。德国人在中欧的崛起产生了交替和重叠的地区以及通胀增长和战略崩溃的时期，导致许多欧洲人寻求绝对非大陆英镑的相对稳定。对德国人来说，这是值得为之奋斗的许多事情之一。. . 最终没有成功。到第一次世界大战进入第三个年头时，所有欧洲大陆国家都在贬值其货币以支付冲突，引发货币崩溃和失控的通货膨胀。. . 这只会加速英镑事实上成为欧洲唯一理想的货币。
By the late 1800s Britain’s command of the seas often translated into trade chokeholds. The rise of the Germans in Central Europe generated alternating and overlapping regions and periods of inflationary growth and strategic collapse, leading many Europeans to seek the relative stability of the decidedly non-Continental pound. To the Germans this was one of many things worth fighting over . . . that ultimately didn’t work out. By the time World War I had stretched into its third year, all the continental European countries were debasing their currencies to pay for the conflict, triggering currency collapses and runaway inflation . . . which only accelerated the pound’s de facto adoption as Europe’s only desirable currency.
它并没有持续多久。在第一次世界大战后的混乱和经济崩溃中，事实证明即使是大英帝国也不足以支持欧洲每个人都需要的货币。与他们之前的罗马人和西班牙人一样，对英镑的需求导致了基于货币的通货膨胀，再加上战争的普遍经济混乱，加上全球关税之上50 年的殖民/帝国经济体系的解体战争。把它加起来，结果证明大萧条可能比它需要的要严重一点。
It didn’t last long. In the post–World War I chaos and economic collapse, even the British Empire proved insufficiently large to support the currency that everyone in Europe needed. As with the Romans and Spanish before them, demand for the pound generated currency-based inflation on top of the general economic dislocation of the war on top of the unwinding of a half-millennium of colonial/imperial economic systems on top of a global tariff war. Add it up and the Great Depression turned out to be perhaps a bit greater than it needed to be.
这让我们想到了美国人。到 1900 年，美国已经取代了整个大英帝国，成为世界上最大的经济体。此外，美国人甚至没有加入世界第一次世界大战直到三年后，才能够充当欧洲人的债权人，而不是需要让他们的货币贬值来继续战斗。英镑没有像法郎、德国马克或卢布那样贬值，但美元根本没有贬值。*
Which brings us to the Americans. By 1900 the United States had already displaced the entirety of the British Empire as the world’s single-largest economy. Furthermore, the Americans didn’t even join World War I until three years in, and so were able to serve as creditor to the Europeans rather than needing to debase their currency to keep fighting. The British pound wasn’t as debased as the franc or deutschmark or ruble, but the dollar wasn’t debased at all.*
更好的是，美国人完全愿意向二战盟军提供他们需要的任何东西——石油或燃料、钢铁或枪支、小麦或面粉——只要他们以黄金支付。到战争结束时，美国经济不仅大得多，而且欧洲经济小得多。美元不仅是整个西半球唯一合理的交换媒介：它从欧洲吸走了本可以在东半球任何地方成为长期货币竞争者的金属。如果有的话，这比听起来更真实。毕竟，欧洲的金属支持货币是所有时代所有人类文明的顶峰，从以前开始就剥夺了整个星球的贵金属有记载的历史的黎明。
Even better, the Americans were perfectly willing to provide the World War II Allies with anything they needed—oil or fuel, steel or guns, wheat or flour—so long as they were paid in gold. By war’s end the U.S. economy wasn’t only far larger and that of Europe far smaller. The U.S. dollar wasn’t just the only reasonable medium of exchange in the entire Western Hemisphere: it had sucked the very metal out of Europe that would have enabled a long-term currency competitor anywhere in the Eastern Hemisphere. If anything, this is truer than it sounds. After all, the metals-backed currencies of Europe were the culmination of all human civilizations of all eras stripping the entire planet of precious metals since before the dawn of recorded history.
现在是在诺克斯堡。
Now it was in Fort Knox.
在欧洲大陆的困境和英镑供应不足之间，欧洲几乎每个人都放弃了他们的贵金属挂钩，转而采用一种体系，在这种体系中，他们自己的货币由美元支持（而美元又由黄金支持。 . . 直到最近还是欧洲）。
Between continental Europe’s woes and insufficient supplies of the British pound, pretty much everyone in Europe abandoned their precious-metals pegs and shifted to a system where their own currencies were backed by none other than the U. S. dollar (which was in turn backed by gold . . . that had until recently been European).
从成功，失败
FROM SUCCESS, FAILURE
1945 年 8 月的第二个整周，当枪炮声终于平息时，过去五个世纪的所有主要强国都被摧毁、衰弱、衰弱、与更广阔的世界隔绝，或以其某种组合出现。只有美国拥有支持所需的贵金属一种跨国的，更不用说全球性的货币。只有美国拥有将这种货币广泛传播的军事能力。全球交易媒介的唯一甚至理论上的候选者是美元。它不需要在布雷顿森林条约中正式化才能实现。*
When the guns finally fell silent that second full week of August in 1945, all the major powers of the previous five centuries were smashed, impoverished, enervated, isolated from the wider world, or some combination thereof. Only the United States had the precious metals required to back an extra-national, much less global, currency. Only the United States had the military capacity to take that currency far and wide. The only even theoretical candidate for a global medium of exchange was the U.S. dollar. It did not need to be formalized in the Bretton Woods treaties for that to happen.*
全球范围内黄金支持的美元化是肯定的。同样可以肯定的是，黄金支持的美元化注定要失败。
Gold-backed dollarization on a global scale was a certainty. It was similarly certain that gold-backed dollarization was doomed to failure.
修会的开始意味着那些在整个历史上一直互相掐着喉咙的民族不仅和平了，而且被迫站在了同一边。一下子，曾经硬连线支持遥远的帝国主权的地方经济可以在地方发展和扩张的基础上重塑自己。一下子，任何人和每个人——我的意思是任何人和每个人——都可以交易任何东西和每一个事物。更多的国家，快速重建，快速增长，快速现代化，快速工业化，快速城市化，新兴贸易。多年来遭受以基础设施为目标的轰炸袭击的德国和日本等地再次证明他们可以建造任何东西。出色地。而且很快。
The commencement of the Order meant that peoples who had been at each other’s throats for the entirety of their histories were not only at peace but were forced to be on the same side. All at once, local economies once hardwired to support a distant imperial sovereign could reinvent themselves on the basis of local development and expansion. All at once, anyone and everyone—and I mean anyone and everyone—could trade for anything and everything. More countries, rapid rebuilding, rapid growth, rapid modernization, rapid industrialization, rapid urbanization, burgeoning trade. Places like Germany and Japan that had suffered infrastructure-targeting bombing raids for years proved once again that they could build anything. Well. And quickly.
都是花了钱的。大部分都是拿硬通货，而且只有一种硬通货可供选择。
All of it took money. Most of it took hard currency, and there was only one hard currency to choose from.
润滑这样一个快速发展的系统需要大量资金，尤其是在中间产品贸易从国内现象转变为跨国现象的情况下。美国人扩大了他们的货币供应量以满足全球经济不断扩大的需求，这也意味着美国人需要越来越多的黄金来支持不断扩大的货币供应量。
Lubricating such a rapidly growing system required a lot of dollars, particularly as the trade in intermediate goods shifted from an internal to a multinational phenomenon. The Americans expanded their money supply to meet the expanding global economy’s needs, which also meant the Americans needed more and more gold to back the ever-expanding currency supply.
这些数字不仅没有加起来，而且不能加起来。纵观人类历史，人类大概只生产了不超过 60 亿个金衡盎司黄金（约 4.2 亿磅）。假设曾经开采的每一块黄金都可供美国政府使用，那将仅足以“支撑” 2100 亿美元的全球货币总供应量。*从 1950 年到 1971 年，全球贸易增长了这个数字的五倍，而美元本身就是美国的货币，而美国的 GDP 已经超过了全球贸易总额。该命令鼓励的和平与经济增长也使全球人口从 25 亿增加到 38 亿，这表明对以美元为基础的贸易的需求将大大增加。*即使政治是完美的，金本位也注定要失败。
The numbers not only didn’t add up, they couldn’t add up. Throughout human history, humanity has probably produced no more than 6 billion troy ounces of gold (about 420 million pounds). Assuming every scrap of gold ever mined was available to the U.S. government, that would only be enough to “back” a total global currency supply of $210 billion.* From 1950 to 1971, global trade expanded by quintuple that figure, on top of the fact that the U.S. dollar was the currency of the United States itself, which already had a GDP larger than total global trade. The peace and economic growth that the Order encouraged also increased the global population from 2.5 billion to 3.8 billion, suggesting much stronger demand for U.S.-dollar-enabled trade to come.* Even if the politics had been perfect, the gold standard was doomed to fail.
美国人尴尬而痛苦地发现，不仅资产支持货币与快速增长不相容的老问题，而且资产支持货币与全球和平不相容的新问题——形成的那种和平美国反苏同盟的中坚力量。
The Americans awkwardly and painfully discovered for themselves not only the age-old issue that asset-backed currencies were incompatible with rapid growth, but the very age-new issue that asset-backed currencies were incompatible with global peace—the sort of peace that formed the backbone of America’s anti-Soviet alliance.
美国人发现自己受制于自己的总体规划，而且政治肯定也不完美。
The Americans found themselves hostage to their own master plan, and the politics were most assuredly not perfect.
最初的布雷顿森林协议的条款之一——旨在确保对新体系的信心——是任何签署国都可以根据需要以任何数量的美元兑现黄金。在整个 1960 年代，法国人就是这样做的，越来越疯狂的 hwa-hwa-hwainess。通常情况下，对黄金的这种不断增长的需求会推高其价格，但通过条约将黄金价格固定为每金衡盎司 35 美元，以建立最重要的信任。随着价格发现的“正常”途径被取消，唯一可能的结果就是推高对美元本身的需求。结果？交换媒介——美元——日益短缺——这一过程威胁到解除战后秩序的所有经济成就。法国人（和其他人）打赌整个系统会失败，因此囤积黄金以备不时之需。
One of the clauses of the original Bretton Woods agreements—designed to ensure confidence in the new system—was that any signatory could cash in their dollars for gold, in any volume, on demand. Throughout the 1960s the French did just that, with increasingly maniacal hwa-hwa-hwainess. Normally such rising demand for gold would jack up its price, but the price of gold was fixed via treaty at the rate of $35 per troy ounce in order to build that all-important trust. With the “normal” avenue for price discovery eliminated, the only possible outcome was to drive up demand for the dollar itself. The result? Increasing shortages in the exchange medium—the U.S. dollar—a process that threatened to unwind all the economic achievements of the postwar Order. The French (and others) were betting that the entire system would fail and so were hoarding gold in preparation for the aftermath.
面对全球经济萧条的可能性，这将使美国独自面对拥有核武器的苏联，美国人做了他们唯一能做的事。在 20 世纪 70 年代初期的一系列步骤中，尼克松政府切断了联系，让美元实现全面自由浮动。
Faced with the possibility of a global economic depression that would leave America facing down a nuclear-armed Soviet Union alone, the Americans did the only thing they could. In a series of steps in the early 1970s, the Nixon administration cut the cord and put the U.S. dollar on a full, free float.
第一次，一个主要政府甚至不假装在金库里有任何东西。支撑美元的唯一“资产”是美国政府的“充分信心和信用”。美国 1971 年后全球化推动的联盟策略的本质完全是基于 Tricky Dick Nixon 所说的“相信我”。
For the first time, a major government didn’t even pretend to have anything in the vault. The only “asset” backing the dollar was the “full faith and credit” of the U.S. government. The very nature of America’s post-1971 globalization-fueled alliance gambit was quite literally based upon none other than Tricky Dick Nixon saying, “Trust me.”
我们对会发生什么一无所知，因为我们都手牵着手，愉快地走上了人迹罕至的道路：法定货币之路。
We had zero idea what to expect as, hand in hand, we all gaily skipped down the road less traveled: the road of fiat currency.
京城奇遇
Adventures in Capital
如果 1971 年之前的时代有一条独特的金融规则，那就是钱永远不够用。货币价值与某种资产直接相关，而货币量则取决于相关主权国家的能力和范围。这两个特征都对发行货币的政府以及使用货币的个人和公司（以及其他政府）产生了极大的限制。
If there was a singular rule of finance in the era before 1971, it was that there was never enough money. Currency value was directly linked to some sort of asset, while currency volume was determined by the capacity and reach of the sovereign power in question. Both characteristics generated extreme limitations, both for the governments issuing the currencies and for the people and firms (and other governments) who used them.
在这个陌生的新世界里，货币数量有限的奇异规则消失了。不再存在数量有限的货币，因此需要谨慎管理，不再对资本可用性设置任何实际上限。限制成为一个纯粹的政治问题。
In this strange new world, that singular rule—that money exists in limited quantity—evaporated. Instead of money existing in a finite amount and so needing to be scrupulously managed, there was no longer any practical cap on capital availability. Limitations became a purely political question.
对于美国人来说，“限制”非常简单：继续扩大货币供应，直到有足够的货币来支持整个全球化贸易体系。但对于其他使用美元作为货币支持者的人来说，“限制”的定义意味着每个政府认为它需要表达的意思。这种广泛的差异使得资产支持货币世界中可能从未存在过的工具和选择得以开发。这些工具和选项反过来催生了整个治理系统，这些系统在前法令时代存在的可能性为零。
For the Americans that “limitation” was pretty straightforward: keep expanding the money supply until there is sufficient currency to support the overall globalized trading system. But for everyone else who used the U.S. dollar as their currency backer, the definition of “limitation” meant whateeeeever each individual government thought it needed to mean. That broad divergence allowed the development of tools and options that could have never existed in the world of asset-backed currencies. These tools and options in turn gave birth to entire governing systems that would have had zero chances of existing in the pre-fiat age.
一分钱一分货：亚洲金融模式
MONEY FOR NOTHING: THE ASIAN FINANCIAL MODEL
这一切都始于日本。
It all begins with Japan.
早在世界大战之前，甚至早在美国海军上将佩里迫使日本向世界开放之前，日本人就对债务有着独特的看法。在日本，资本的存在不是为了满足经济需要，而是为了服务政治需要。为此，允许甚至鼓励举债。. . 只要它不会给君主带来不便。追溯到七世纪，如果广泛的债务妨碍了天皇或将军的目标，它就会根据德政的债务免除学说被简单地解散。干旱？德政！洪水？德政！饥荒？德政！政府赤字？德政。. . 加收百分之十的手续费！
Long before the world wars, even long before America’s Admiral Perry forced Japan open to the world, the Japanese had a unique view of debt. In Japan capital exists not to serve economic needs, but instead to serve political needs. To that end, debt was allowed, even encouraged . . . so long as it didn’t become inconvenient to the sovereign. Dating back to the seventh century, if widespread debt got in the way of the emperor or sho-gun’s goals, it was simply dissolved under the debt forgiveness doctrine of tokusei. Drought? Tokusei! Floods? Tokusei! Famine? Tokusei! Government in the red? Tokusei . . . with a 10 percent processing fee!
因此，债务往往会激增，尤其是在债务已经普遍存在的情况下。毕竟，整体财务状况越糟糕，皇帝越有可能出现在他的阳台上，挥舞着他神奇的权杖，宣布这种或那种类型的债务无效。这种情况经常发生，以至于银行家竭尽全力保护他们的经济和身体健康：他们倾向于将tokusei 附加条款写进他们的贷款中，这样借款人就不能指望债务会蒸发，他们同样需要住在有围墙的大院，因此当宣布特征时，暴徒不能冲进他们的家园，将他们打死，也不能烧毁贷款文件，以防止这些骑手被处决。娱乐时间。
As such, debt tended to boom, especially when debt was already widespread. After all, the worse the overall financial situation, the better the chance the emperor would emerge onto his balcony, wave his fabulous scepter, and declare this or that class of debts null and void. It happened so often that bankers went to extraordinary lengths to protect their economic and physical well-being: they had a tendency to write tokusei riders into their loans so borrowers couldn’t count on the debt simply evaporating, and they similarly needed to live in walled compounds so when a tokusei was declared, mobs could not storm their homes, beat them to death, and burn the loan documentation to prevent such riders from being executed. Fun times.
无论如何，这里的要点是，虽然经济和政治一直交织在一起，但日本是使金融成为国家工具的潮流引领者。一旦那个特定的封印被打破，日本政府就很常见地向任何需要做的项目投入大量现金，令人尴尬。在大多数情况下，这种“现金”采取贷款的形式，因为——你猜对了——有时政府发现简单地清偿自己的债务并从财务上重新开始是很方便的。Tokusei总是让某人拿着袋子，但在二战前混乱不堪的日本，通常是社会的某些派别碰巧与中央政府背道而驰，所以。. . 任何。
Anyhow, the point here is that while economics and politics have always been intertwined, Japan was the trendsetter in making finance a tool of the state. Once that particular seal was broken, it became pretty common for the Japanese government to shove embarrassingly large amounts of cash at whatever project needed doing. In most cases such “cash” took the form of loans because—you guessed it—sometimes the government found it handy to simply dissolve its own debts and start from financial scratch. Tokusei always left someone holding the bag, but in rough-and-tumble pre–World War II Japan, it was typically some faction of society that happened to be on the outs with the central government, so . . . whatever.
第二次世界大战的结束引发了另一次债务重置，尽管与其说是因为圣旨，不如说是因为一切都被夷为平地。考虑到外国人对日本人造成的绝对破坏和屈辱，战后日本在文化上步调一致至关重要。不让任何人掉队。
The end of World War II triggered another debt reset, albeit less because of imperial decree and more because everything had been leveled. Considering the absolute devastation and humiliation the gaijin had visited upon the Japanese, it was paramount that postwar Japan move in cultural lockstep. That no one be left behind.
解决办法是运用日本特有的对待债务的态度大规模的重建工作，大量资金涌入任何可能的开发项目。具体重点不是修复和扩建有形基础设施和工业厂房，而是将市场份额和吞吐量最大化作为实现大规模就业的一种手段。购买人民的忠诚和幸福——他们理所当然地感到被战时领导背叛了——比创造利润或建造东西更重要。一群忠诚而快乐的人非常擅长建造东西，这并没有什么坏处。
The solution was to apply the peculiar Japanese attitude to debt toward broad-scale rebuilding efforts, with massive volumes of capital poured into any possible development project. The specific focus was less on the repair and expansion of physical infrastructure and industrial plant than on maximizing market share and throughput as a means of achieving mass employment. Purchasing the loyalty and happiness of the population—who rightly felt betrayed by their wartime leadership—was more important than generating profits or building stuff. That a loyal and happy population was pretty good at building stuff didn’t hurt.
从西方经济学的角度来看，这样的决策被称为“糟糕的资本配置”，即几乎没有全额偿还债务的希望。但这不是重点。日本的金融模式不是为了实现经济稳定，而是为了确保政治稳定。
From a Western economic point of view, such decision making would be called “poor capital allocation,” the idea being that there were few prospects that the debt would ever be paid back in full. But that wasn’t the point. The Japanese financial model wasn’t about achieving economic stability, but instead about securing political stability.
这种关注是有代价的。当目标是市场份额和就业时，成本管理和盈利能力就会悄然淡出背景。在一个不关心盈利能力的债务驱动系统中，任何短缺都可以简单地用更多的债务来弥补。雇用员工和购买原材料的债务。债务开发新产品。向新客户推销这些产品的债务。帮助新客户为这些新购买提供资金的债务。
That focus came at a cost. When the goals are market share and employment, cost management and profitability quietly fade into the background. In a debt-driven system that doesn’t care about profitability, any shortfall could simply be covered with more debt. Debt to hire staff and purchase raw materials. Debt to develop new products. Debt to market those products to new customers. Debt to help the new customers finance those new purchases.
债务滚动债务。
Debt to roll over the debt.
日本人并不孤单。战争结束后，一批新的玩家效仿了日本的书。韩国、台湾、新加坡和香港多年来一直是日本的保护国（在某些情况下是几十年），并享有（或遭受）最大的日本文化印记。这种印记延伸到日本的观点中，即金融既关乎经济，也关乎政治和国家目标。
The Japanese were hardly alone. War’s end saw a new crop of players take a page from the Japanese book. South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong had been Japanese protectorates for years (in some cases for decades) and enjoyed (or suffered) the greatest Japanese cultural imprint. That imprint extended into Japan’s view that finance is as much about politics and state goals as it is about economics.
四人利用这种信念，汇集了大量西方（和日本）资本，跨越了发展、工业化和城市化进程的整个阶段。在 1950 年代和 60 年代，他们通过从外国大量借款并将资金用于系统各个方面的彻底改革来做到这一点。德国人花费了一个多世纪的工业化进程——德国人在快速建设和检修事物方面毫不懈怠——采取了台湾人、新加坡人、香港人不到三个十年。韩国人在不到两次的时间内就做到了。
The four leveraged that belief, funneling scads of Western (and Japanese) capital to leapfrog entire phases of the development, industrialization, and urbanization processes. In the 1950s and 1960s they did so by borrowing massively from foreigners and applying the capital to root-and-branch overhauls of every aspect of their systems. The industrialization process that took Germans more than a century—and the Germans are no slouches when it comes to building and overhauling things quickly—took the Taiwanese, Singaporeans, and Hong Kongers less than three decades. The Koreans did it in less than two.
进入 1971 年。外国（黄金支持的）资本突然变得不那么重要了。如果利润无法偿还债务，那么出口收入就可以了。如果收益不能，公司可以简单地获得更多贷款。如果没有贷款，政府总是可以扩大货币供应量来推动一切。（扩大货币供应也压低了亚洲货币的价值，使他们的出口更具竞争力，从而推高了出口收入，这并没有什么害处。）
Enter 1971. Suddenly foreign (gold-backed) capital became less critical to the equation. If profits could not cover debt payments, then export earnings would. If earnings could not, firms could simply take out more loans. If loans were not available, the government could always expand the money supply to push everything forward. (It didn’t hurt that expanding the money supply also drove down the value of the Asians’ currencies, making their exports more competitive and therefore driving up export income.)
在第一次亚洲浪潮中，农业让位于纺织业和重工业。在 1971 年后的浪潮中，重工业让位于各种可以想象到的越来越先进的制造业：白色家电、玩具、汽车、电子产品、计算机、手机产品。资本驱动的增长接连不断的资本驱动增长意味着在两代人的时间里，这四个国家都已将自己转变为现代工业化体系，可与世界上许多最成熟的城市相提并论。考虑到大多数人一开始都是地球上最不发达和最贫穷的地区，他们的集体改造是历史上最伟大的经济成功故事之一。
In the first Asian wave, agriculture gave way to textiles and heavy industry. In the post-1971 wave, heavy industry gave way to ever-more-advanced manufacturing of every imaginable sort: white goods, toys, automotive, electronics, computers, cellular products. Capital-driven growth upon capital-driven growth meant that within two generations, all four countries had transformed themselves into modern industrialized systems on par with many of the world’s most established cities. Considering that most were among the least developed and poorest patches of the planet at the onset, their collective makeover is among history’s greatest economic success stories.
三件事有帮助：
Three things helped:
首先，美国人稳步将自己的产业外包给亚洲国家。这为亚洲人的债务驱动模式提供了极好的理由，并确保了美国（以及全球）对亚洲人产品的旺盛需求。
First, the Americans steadily outsourced their own industry to the Asian states. That provided an excellent rationale for the Asians’ debt-driven model, as well as ensuring ravenous American (and in time, global) demand for the Asians’ products.
其次，事实证明，外国需求强劲且稳定，足以使亚洲国家的出口有利可图，以至于所有四个国家都设法（在很大程度上）摆脱了债务。
Second, that foreign demand proved robust and stable enough to make the Asians’ exports profitable enough that all four managed to (for the most part) grow out of the debt.
第三，作为最热情的法定货币采用者，亚洲人愿意将可能的极限推向极限，以至于美国人和欧洲人对亚洲金融的本质感到有些不安。除了在数学上玩得乱七八糟之外，亚洲人还结合使用法律和文化障碍来积极阻止外国势力进入他们的金融世界。例如，大多数亚洲企业集团在他们自己的公司结构内的发达银行——祝你好运。这种增长、利润和控制的结合使亚洲人能够偶尔发生半计划的债务危机，以摆脱最严重的金融失衡，而不会危及他们的政治或经济体系。
Third, as the most enthusiastic of the fiat currency adopters, the Asians were willing to push the limits of what was possible to the point that Americans and Europeans got a bit skittish about the very nature of Asian finance. In addition to playing fast and loose with the math, the Asians used a mix of legal and cultural barriers to actively discourage foreign penetration into their financial world. For example, most Asian conglomerates developed banks within their own corporate structures—good luck investing in that. Such a combination of growth, profits, and control enabled the Asians to have occasional semi-planned debt crises to shake out the worst financial imbalances without risking their political or economic systems.
随着时间的推移，该模式传播到其他亚洲国家，结果喜忧参半。新加坡发展成为一个全球金融中心，将遵循（主要）西方规范的西方资本应用于对西方人有意义的项目，同时将亚洲资金投入到整个东南亚更可疑的项目中。马来西亚和泰国利用亚洲金融战略成功进入半导体和电子领域，并尝试（不太成功）涉足汽车领域。从某种意义上说，当金钱免费时，印度尼西亚更关注腐败的内在机会。当 1997-98 年的亚洲金融危机迫使清算时，这四个国家（以及韩国、日本和台湾）的许多糟糕的资本配置决策都受到了影响。
In time, the model spread to other Asian nations, with mixed results. Singapore evolved into a global financial hub, applying Western capital following (mostly) Western norms to projects that made sense to Westerners, while spamming Asian money at more questionable projects throughout Southeast Asia. Malaysia and Thailand used Asian financial strategies to move successfully into semiconductors and electronics, and to (far less successfully) try their hands at automotive. Indonesia focused more on the inherent opportunities for corruption that manifest when money is, in a sense, free. Many of the poor capital allocation decisions shook out from all four (and Korea and Japan and Taiwan) when the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis forced a reckoning.
亚洲金融模式最大的追随者当然是中国。与其说中国人以任何全新的方式应用了这个模型，不如说他们几乎在每一个方面都把这个模型推向了荒谬的极端。
The biggest of the adherents to the Asian financial model is, of course, China. It isn’t so much that the Chinese applied the model in any fundamentally new ways, but instead that they carried the model to its absurd extremes by nearly every measure.
荒谬的部分原因仅仅是规模。当中国在 1980 年开始走上发展道路时，它已经有 10 亿人口，超过从日本到印度尼西亚的其他东亚国家的总和。
Part of the absurdity is simply size. When China started down its development path in 1980, it already had one billion people, more than the combined total of the rest of the East Asian nations, from Japan to Indonesia.
部分是时机。直到 20 世纪 70 年代末尼克松-毛泽东峰会、毛泽东逝世以及广泛的经济改革启动之后，中国才进入全球秩序。当中国人准备好开始做生意时，黄金标准已经过去了将近十年。现代共产主义中国只知道法定货币和廉价货币的时代。它没有改掉的好习惯。
Part was timing. China’s entrance into the global Order did not occur until after the Nixon-Mao summit, the death of Mao, and the initiation of broad-spectrum economic reforms in the late 1970s. By the time the Chinese were ready to get down to the business of business, the gold standard was nearly a decade gone. Modern Communist China has known nothing but the era of fiat currencies and cheap money. It had no good habits to break.
部分原因在于北京统一目标的性质。韩国、马来西亚和印度尼西亚的一半人口分布在一个很小的足迹上（韩国人是大首尔，马来西亚人是马来半岛中部西海岸，和印度尼西亚的爪哇岛）。在工业化之前，日本是世界上种族最纯正的国家。新加坡是一个城市。这些亚洲国家开始时人口相当统一。
Part was the nature of Beijing’s unification goals. Korea, Malaysia, and Indonesia have half their populations on a small footprint (Greater Seoul for the Koreans, the west coast of the middle Malay Peninsula for Malaysia, and the island of Java for Indonesia). Japan was the world’s most ethnically pure state before it industrialized. Singapore is a city. These Asian states began with reasonably unified populations.
中国不是这样。中国很乱。
Not so with China. China is messy.
即使剔除无人区和人烟稀少的地区，中国的国土面积也超过 150 万平方英里，与整个西欧的面积差不多。这片人口达 150 万平方英里的土地横跨从近沙漠到近苔原再到近热带的气候带。*即使是中国的“简单”部分，华北平原，也比地球上任何其他地方见证了更多的战争和种族清洗。在有历史记载的大部分时间里，位于中国中部的长江流域一直是世界上最发达的经济体之一。中国南部崎岖的地貌容纳了从亚洲许多民族中最贫穷和技术最落后的人到香港的超级技术统治者的一切。
Even eliminating the un- and lightly populated portions, China spans more than 1.5 million square miles, about the same size as all of Western Europe. This populated 1.5 million square miles spans climate zones from near desert to near tundra to near tropics.* Even the “simple” part of China, the North China Plain, has witnessed more wars and ethnic cleansings than any other spot on the planet. The Yangtze Valley in China’s center has ranked among the world’s most sophisticated economies for most of recorded history. Southern China’s rugged landscapes have hosted everything from the poorest and most technologically backward of Asia’s many peoples to the hypertechnocracy of Hong Kong.
每个国家都重视政治统一。为了实现这一目标，每个国家都进行了内部战争。中国自己的内部统一努力是世界上最令人发指的努力之一，可以追溯到四千年和数十次离散冲突。最近的重大冲突——毛泽东的文化大革命——造成至少 4000 万人死亡，是美国人在所有战争中死亡人数的 25 倍。中国人对内部政治暴力、镇压和宣传的必要性的信念并非凭空出现，而是被视为避免噩梦般的内战的必要现实。解决方案？
Every country puts a premium on political unification. Every country has fought internal wars to achieve it. China’s own internal unification effort is one of the world’s most heinous, stretching back across four millennia and dozens of discrete conflicts. The most recent major dustup—Mao’s Cultural Revolution—killed at least 40 million people, twenty-five times the number of Americans killed in all wars. The Chinese belief in the necessity of internal political violence, repression, and propaganda didn’t manifest out of nowhere, but is instead viewed as a necessary reality to avoid nightmarish civil wars. The solution?
花费！
Spend!
中国政府把资本分配给一切。基础设施建设。工业厂房扩建。运输系统。教育系统。卫生系统。一切能让人们找到工作的东西。极少的一部分可以被称为“明智的资本配置”。目标不是效率或盈利能力，而是实现克服区域、地理、气候、人口、民族和千年的历史障碍统一。没有价格太高。
The Chinese government assigns capital to everything. Infrastructure development. Industrial plant buildout. Transport systems. Educational systems. Health systems. Everything and anything that puts people in jobs. Excruciatingly little of it would qualify as “wise capital allocation.” The goal isn’t efficiency or profitability, but instead achieving the singular political goal of overcoming regional, geographic, climatic, demographic, ethnic, and millennia of historical barriers to unity. No price is too high.
所以确实付出了代价：
And so a price was indeed paid:
2020 日历年的新增贷款约为 34.9 万亿元人民币（约合 5.4 万亿美元），即使你使用连中国国家经济学家都认为臃肿的国民经济规模统计数据，也仅占 GDP 的 40%。最好的猜测是，截至 2022 年，中国企业未偿债务总额已达到 GDP 的 350%，即约 385 万亿元人民币（58 万亿美元）。
Fresh new lending in calendar year 2020 was about 34.9 trillion yuan (roughly US$5.4 trillion), which, even if you use the statistics for national economic size that even Chinese state economists say are bloated, comes to just shy of 40 percent of GDP. The best guess is that as of calendar year 2022, total outstanding corporate debt in China has reached 350 percent of GDP, or some 385 trillion yuan (US$58 trillion).
中国人像拥抱亚洲金融模式一样热情地拥抱法定货币时代。中国印钞的速度经常是美国的两倍多，有时甚至是美国的五倍。尽管美元是世界的价值储存手段和全球交换媒介，但直到 2010 年代，香港才开始使用人民币。*
The Chinese have embraced the fiat currency era just as warmly as they embraced the Asian financial model. China regularly prints currency at more than double the rate of the United States, sometimes at five times the U.S. rate. And whereas the U.S. dollar is the store of value for the world and the global medium of exchange, the Chinese yuan wasn’t even used in Hong Kong until the 2010s.*
中国金融模式的重要组成部分是没有顶层。因为这个系统在问题上投入了无穷无尽的资金，所以它很饿。任何东西——我的意思是什么——都不允许阻碍发展。价格不是问题，因为信贷量不是问题。许多结果之一是对任何数量有限的产品展开疯狂的竞价战。如果对水泥、铜或石油的旺盛需求推动产品价格上涨，那么该系统只会部署更多资本来确保它们的安全。
Part and parcel of the Chinese financial model is that there is no top. Because the system throws a bottomless supply of money at issues, it is hongry. Nothing—and I mean nothing—is allowed to stand in the way of development. Price is no issue because the volume of credit is no issue. One result among many is insane bidding wars for any product that exists in limited quantity. If ravenous demand for cement or copper or oil drives product prices up, then the system simply deploys more capital to secure them.
20 世纪 80 年代日本的房地产也发生了类似的事情，当时有一个短暂而奇怪的时刻，据称东京市中心一平方英里的价值超过了整个美国西部沿海地区。这日本人立即意识到，这并不是事情完全正确的迹象，而是出现了根本错误。中国人还没有注册这样一个黑暗的尤里卡。尤其是中国的繁荣在 2003 年至 2007 年间给全球大宗商品市场带来了压力，油价在 2007 年达到历史高位，经通胀调整后约为每桶 150 美元。
Something similar occurred in Japan in the 1980s with real estate, when for a brief and bizarre moment a square mile of downtown Tokyo was supposedly worth more than the entire U.S. western seaboard. The Japanese immediately recognized that this was not a sign that things had gone radically right, but instead that something had gone radically wrong. The Chinese have yet to register such a dark eureka. In particular the Chinese boom stressed global commodities markets between 2003 and 2007, with oil prices reaching historical, inflation-adjusted highs in 2007 of approximately $150 a barrel.
另一个结果是大量生产过剩。中国担心的是闲手，而不是底线。迄今为止，中国是世界上最大的钢铁、铝和水泥出口国，因为这三种产品的产量甚至超过了贪得无厌的中国的消耗量。中国备受讨论的“一带一路”全球基础设施计划——许多非中国人担心该计划部分是影响力兜售，部分是战略策略——在许多方面不过是处理盈余的一种手段。
Another result is massive overproduction. China is worried about idle hands, not bottom lines. China is by far the world’s largest exporter of steel and aluminum and cement because it produces more of all three than even hyper-ravenous China can use. China’s much-discussed One Belt One Road global infrastructure program—which many non-Chinese fear is part influence peddling, part strategic gambit—is in many ways little more than a means of disposing of the surpluses.
亚洲金融模式的中国推导最重要的结果也许是没有尽头。所有其他亚洲国家最终都接受了该模型的巨额债务最终导致垃圾箱火灾的性质。日本在 1989 年崩溃，用了 30年才摆脱债务。复苏的时间太长，以至于日本失去了全部人口红利，而且不太可能再次实现有意义的经济增长。印度尼西亚于 1998 年崩溃，摧毁了其政府。两次。该国的政治制度仍然一团糟。韩国和泰国也在 1998 年崩溃，并利用痛苦巩固了向文官统治的过渡（这一过程在韩国比泰国产生了更持久的结果）。
Perhaps the most significant result of the Chinese derivation of the Asian financial model is that there is no end. All the other Asian states ultimately came to terms with the massive-debt-eventually-leads-to-dumpster-fires nature of the model. Japan crashed in 1989 and took thirty years to emerge from under the debt. The recovery took so long that Japan lost the entirety of its demographic dividend and is unlikely to ever have meaningful economic growth again. Indonesia crashed in 1998, which destroyed its government. Twice. The country’s political system remains a chaotic mess. Korea and Thailand also crashed in 1998 and used the pain to solidify transition to civilian rule (a process that bore more durable results in Korea than Thailand).
这些选择在北京都不能考虑。中国共产党唯一的合法性来源是经济增长，而中国唯一的经济增长来自数量惊人的融资。每当中国政府试图缩减信贷并使国家经济更健康或更可持续时，增长就会崩溃，当地人开始谈论成群结队地长途跋涉，而政府则将信贷龙头重新开满。在中共看来，摆脱债务就是现代中国、统一中国和中共的终结的代名词。在这一点上，党可能是正确的。这是不对的令人惊讶的是，中共首选的财富储存方式是美元。. . 中国境外。
None of these options can be considered in Beijing. The Chinese Communist Party’s only source of legitimacy is economic growth, and China’s only economic growth comes from egregious volumes of financing. Every time the Chinese government attempts to dial back the credit and make the country’s economy more healthy or sustainable, growth crashes, the natives start talking about making lengthy strolls in large groups, and the government turns the credit spigot back to full. In the CCP’s mind, moving away from debt-as-all is synonymous with the end of modern China, unified China, and the CCP. In that, the Party is probably correct. It’s no surprise then that the CCP’s preferred method of storing their wealth is in U.S. currency . . . outside of China.
大融合：欧元模式
THE GREAT CONFLATION: THE EURO MODEL
在金融方面，欧洲人比亚洲人保守得多，但这有点像说琼·里弗斯不像雪儿那样喜欢整形手术。
The Europeans are far more reserved than the Asians when it comes to finance, but that’s a bit like saying Joan Rivers didn’t like plastic surgery as much as Cher.
利润动机在欧洲非常活跃，从房屋所有权到工业扩张的一切都受到资本可用性的限制。然而，欧洲人要求他们的政府提供更高水平的服务、稳定性和支持，而大多数欧洲政府通过修补金融系统（尤其是通过银行）来确保这种服务、稳定性和支持。
The profit motive is alive and well in Europe, with everything from home ownership to industrial expansion constrained by capital availability. Yet Europeans demand higher levels of service, stability, and support from their governments, and most European governments secure that service, stability, and support by tinkering with financial systems, most notably via banks.
最常见的修修补补？指导“私人”银行通过向国家批准的项目或公司直接贷款，或通过购买债券来支持政府预算，来支出资本以支持国家融资。这种对金融世界的部分状态捕获具有多种多样的有时不是很微妙的结果。一个明显的问题是，欧洲股票市场的规模远不及美国，部分原因是没有那么多的免费私人现金可用于填补特定的资本生成方法。一个不太明显的问题是欧洲共同货币欧元本身的存在。
The most common tinkerings? Directing “private” banks to expend capital to support state financing, either via direct loans to state-approved projects or firms, or via bond purchases to support government budgets. This partial state capture of the financial world has a wide variety of sometimes-not-very-subtle outcomes. An obvious one is that European stock markets aren’t nearly as large as America’s, in part because there isn’t as much free private cash available to fill out that particular method of capital generation. A less obvious one is the existence of the European common currency, the euro, itself.
根据传统（当然还有非亚洲）金融规范，抵押品要求、信贷渠道和借贷成本等问题是基于个人或公司历史、先前存在的债务负担和直接可信度等因素的组合。这并不太复杂：如果你想借钱，你应该证明你已经还清了过去的债务，你有能力负担新借贷的贷款服务，并且你没有计划用钱做任何愚蠢的事情。根据整体经济的健康状况添加一些决策范围，并为所有内容着色当前政府关于一般金融的政策，瞧！贷款政策。
According to traditional (and certainly non-Asian) financial norms, issues such as collateral requirements, credit access, and borrowing costs are based on a combination of factors ranging from personal or corporate history, preexisting debt loads, and straight-up believability. It isn’t too complicated: if you want to borrow, it behooves you to prove that you have paid off your debts in the past, that you can afford the loan servicing that will come from new borrowing, and that you aren’t planning to do anything stupid with the money. Add in some decision-making brackets based on the health of the broader economy, and color everything for current government policy as regards finance in general, and voila! Lending policy.
由此产生的一个明显特征是，没有两个经济体是完全相同的。信用在全国级别也由大小和多样性的组合着色。德国人往往很容易获得信贷，这不仅是因为他们节俭、借贷少，因此是良好的信贷赌注，而且还因为德国经济一流、高度多元化、宏观经济稳定且生产力高，德国企业和政府倾向于由 . . . 节俭的德国人。在意大利借贷成本更高，因为意大利政府和民众对偿还债务的态度与对其他一切事情一样懒惰。希腊经济是一场独角戏，由一群对德国这样的地方运转起来的原因了解相对松散的人操纵。每个人都有点不同。欧洲有三十个不同的国家和三十种不同的信用传统。
An obvious characteristic that comes from this is that no two economies are the same. Credit at the national level is also colored by a combination of size and diversity. Germans tend to enjoy easy access to credit not simply because they are frugal and borrow little and so are good credit bets, but also because the German economy is first-rate, highly diversified, macroeconomically stable, and highly productive, and German firms and governments tend to be run by . . . frugal Germans. Borrowing in Italy costs more because the Italian government and population are as laid-back about debt repayments as they are about everything else. The Greek economy is a one-horse tourism show manned by a people with relatively loose understanding of what makes places like Germany tick. Everyone’s a bit different. Europe has thirty different countries with thirty different credit traditions.
不知何时，欧洲人误解了这一基本认识。他们将拥有统一货币的想法混为一谈，这将加深经济区域一体化，并推动欧洲朝着成为全球强国的目标前进。
Somewhere along the line, the Europeans misplaced this basic understanding. They conflated the idea that having a unified currency would deepen economic regional integration as well as push Europe along toward the goal of becoming globally powerful.
出于当时才有意义的原因，在 1990 年代和 2000 年代初，欧洲的每个人都应该能够以以前只提供给最谨慎的欧洲人的条件借款，这已成为欧洲的传统智慧。此外，任何政府或公司在任何时间对任何项目的任何数量的此类借贷都应予以批准。等级。奥地利的银行吞噬了近乎自由的资本，并将其借给了匈牙利自己的次级抵押贷款。西班牙银行开始为他们当地的政治影响者设立全面的行贿基金。意大利银行开始不仅向他们自己的暴徒大量放贷，还向巴尔干地区的有组织犯罪集团放贷。希腊政府发放了大量贷款，几乎发放给了所有人。在没有人愿意居住的地方建设整个城镇。工人领取第十三和第十四个月的工资奖金。公民仅仅因为成为公民就直接获得报酬。希腊完全靠信用举办奥运会。大规模移植。每个人都可以（并且确实）玩过。
For reasons that only made sense at the time, in the 1990s and early 2000s it became Europe’s conventional wisdom that everyone in Europe should be able to borrow at terms that previously had only been offered to the most scrupulous of Europeans. Furthermore, such borrowing should be green-lighted in any volume for any project by any government or corporation at any level. Austrian banks gorged on the near-free capital and lent it on to Hungary’s own version of subprime. Spanish banks started up flat-out slush funds for their local political influencers. Italian banks started lending en masse not simply to their own mob, but to organized crime syndicates in the Balkans. The Greek government took out massive loans, which it disbursed to pretty much everyone. Construction of entire towns where no one wanted to live. Workers received thirteenth- and fourteenth-month salary bonuses. Citizens received direct payments simply for being citizens. Greece hosted an Olympics entirely on credit. Massive graft. Everyone could (and did) play.
希腊成为随之而来的金融灾难的典范。尽管在 2001 年才采用欧元，但到 2012 年，希腊的国债已超过 GDP 的 175%，此外，其私人银行系统内的贷款被破坏，这又占 GDP 的 20%。希腊并不孤单。在一切尘埃落定之前，九个欧盟成员国需要救助。甚至没有加入欧元区的英国人也没有毫发无损地逃脱。在欧元借款和贷款时一定要跟上琼斯的心态之间，欧洲金融危机最终将英国五家最大银行中的两家推入了彻底破产管理程序。
Greece became the poster child of the ensuing financial calamity. Despite only adopting the euro in 2001, Greece by 2012 sported a national debt in excess of 175 percent of GDP, in addition to busted loans within its private banking system, which contributed another 20 percent of GDP to the stack. Greece was hardly alone. Before all was said and done, nine EU member states required bailouts. Nor did the Brits, who didn’t even join the eurozone, escape unscathed. Between euro borrowing and a certain keeping-up-with-the-Joneses mindset when it came to lending, the European financial crisis ultimately pushed two of the United Kingdom’s five biggest banks into outright receivership.
真正可怕的是，欧洲从未从欧元泡沫破灭中恢复过来。直到 2018 年，欧洲人才终于设法让他们的银行业采取与美国人在 2007 年开始的金融危机第一周所采取的相同程度的危机缓解措施。在 2019 年冠状病毒危机伊始，与 2007 年相比，债务占 GDP 的百分比全面上升。在 2020-21 年 COVID 大流行同时将所有人推向水下之前，大部分欧元区国家已经多次陷入和走出衰退。经历过信贷崩溃的国家——最著名的是希腊——在 2022 年仍处于接管状态。
The truly scary thing is Europe never recovered from the popping of the euro bubble. It was not until 2018 that the Europeans finally managed to committee their banking sector into the same degree of crisis mitigation that the Americans pulled off in the first week of the financial crisis that started in 2007. At the dawn of the coronavirus crisis in 2019, debt as a percentage of GDP was higher across the board as compared to 2007. The bulk of the eurozone had been in and out of recession multiple times before the 2020–21 COVID pandemic pushed everyone underwater at the same time. The countries that experienced credit breakdowns—most notably Greece—remain in receivership in 2022.
从 COVID 中恢复的唯一方法需要更多的债务——相当于 GDP的6.5%。*是永远也还不完的债，因为不仅今天的欧洲早已过了人口无法回头的地步，而且大部分欧洲核心国家都已经老态龙钟，绝对不可能再回到经济状态200 6。欧洲面临着成群结队的问题，但如果他们没有搞砸他们的金融世界，欧洲人至少会有一些强大的工具来应对。不再。整个欧洲体系现在所做的只不过是走过场，直到共同货币不可避免地崩溃。
The only way to recover from COVID required even more debt—to the tune of another 6.5 percent of GDP.* It is debt that will never be repaid, because not only is today’s Europe long past the point of demographic no return, but also, most of the core European countries have already aged into obsolescence, absolutely precluding any of them returning to the economic status of 2006. Europe faces hordes of problems, but if they hadn’t mucked up their financial world, the Europeans would have at least had some powerful tools to cope. No more. The entire European system is now doing little more than going through the motions until the common currency inevitably shatters.
在您对亚洲人或欧洲人做出所有判断之前，请了解他们并不是唯一利用我们目前生活的人人有钱的世界的人。美国人也不例外。
Before you get all judgy about the Asians or Europeans, please understand that they are hardly the only ones taking advantage of the cash-for-everyone world we currently live in. The Americans are no exception.
繁荣到萧条再倒退：美国模式
BOOM TO BUST AND BACK AGAIN: THE AMERICAN MODEL
在 1971 年之前的世界，资本稀缺意味着能源领域的大部分工作都是自上而下管理的，参与者越少越好，以管理风险。埃克森美孚在国外生产原油。埃克森美孚通过油轮将原油运回家。埃克森美孚在其拥有的炼油厂将原油提炼成燃料。埃克森美孚将这种燃料分发给零售站。埃克森美孚的特许经营网络将燃料出售给消费者。
In the pre-1971 world, the scarcity of capital meant most work in the energy sphere was managed top-down, with as few players as possible, in order to manage risk. Exxon produced the crude oil in foreign countries. Exxon shipped the crude home via tankers. Exxon refined the crude into fuel at refineries it owned. Exxon distributed that fuel to retail stations. Exxon’s network of franchises sold the fuel to consumers.
然而，1971 年后，资本法则即使没有被废除，也肯定会放松。新的资本结构几乎默认支持风险承担。新公司的出现是为了处理勘探、运输或精炼等离散任务，而不是处理完整的油井到客户链。这些新公司与主要能源公司的内部系统并驾齐驱——甚至在其内部。
Post-1971, however, the laws of capital were, if not repealed, then certainly loosened. The new structure of capital supported risk taking almost by default. New firms popped up to handle discrete tasks such as prospecting or transport or refining rather than the full well-to-customer chain. These new firms swam alongside—or even within—the internal systems of the major energy players.
输入安然。80 年代后期，安然开始扩张，着眼于成为整个美国能源综合体的典型中间人。它创建了天然气“银行”，使其成为生产者和消费者之间的结缔组织。在 1971 年之前的世界中，在任何地方（但在消费点）库存像天然气一样松鼠的产品的成本是愚蠢的。*但 1971 年后，资本可以用来尝试各种新想法。安然最初的天然气业务扩展到石油，扩展到电力，扩展到纸浆和造纸，扩展到电信，扩展到数据传输。*
Enter Enron. In the late 1980s, Enron began its expansion with an eye to becoming the quintessential middleman throughout the American energy complex. It created natural gas “banks” that enabled it to be the connective tissue between producer and consumer. In a pre-1971 world, the cost of inventorying a product as squirrelly as natural gas anywhere but at the point of consumption would have been silly.* But post-1971, the capital was available to try out all kinds of new ideas. Enron’s original business in natural gas expanded into oil expanded into electricity expanded into pulp and paper expanded into telecommunications expanded into data transfer.*
但安然几乎一无所有，在大多数情况下甚至连传输手段都没有。相反，安然通过买卖对未来获取和交付各种产品的承诺来赚取收入。期货市场是真实存在的——它通过在需要即时交付之前将他们与合作伙伴联系起来，为生产者和消费者提供可靠性——但在中间空间进行交易需要一些非常神圣不可侵犯的簿记。
But Enron owned practically nothing, not even the means of transmission in most cases. Instead, Enron earned its income by buying and selling promises for the future taking and delivering of various products. The futures market is a real thing—it provides reliability to both producers and consumers by linking them with partners before the instant delivery is required—but playing in the middle space requires some pretty sacrosanct bookkeeping.
安然公司擅长簿记。神圣不可侵犯的部分？没那么多。事实证明，当你实际上不拥有任何东西或移动任何东西或为任何东西增加价值时，你的唯一收入来自你的分类账。安然真的很擅长在纸上移动事物，在纸上“增加价值”以模拟收入。他们是如此出色，以至于许多人认为安然是未来的浪潮，因此买入。安然在鼎盛时期是美国第七大最有价值的上市公司。
Enron was great at bookkeeping. The sacrosanct part? Not so much. It turns out that when you don’t actually own anything or move anything or add value to anything, your sole income comes from what is in your ledger. Enron got really good at moving things on paper, “adding value” on paper to simulate income. They were so good that many believed Enron was the wave of the future, and so bought in. At its peak, Enron was the United States’ seventh most valuable publicly traded company.
安然的所作所为用“欺诈”一词来形容。
The word for what Enron did is “fraud.”
当安然推出天气期货并将其座右铭改为“世界上最好的公司”时，即使是公司最大的啦啦队也闻到了丹麦的恶臭。在第一次泄密后的五个月内，安然公司高涨的股价暴跌至个位数美分，公司无疑已经破产。由于该公司持有的资产很少，债权人也没有多少骨头可以啃。
When Enron introduced weather futures and changed its motto to “the world’s best company,” even the firm’s biggest cheerleaders picked up on the Danish stench. Within five months of the first leaks, Enron’s highflying stock plunged to the single digits of cents and the firm was undeniably in bankruptcy. Since the firm held so few assets, its creditors didn’t have many bones to gnaw on.
一个更尖锐的例子：
A more searing example:
随着美国 2000-01 年的安然式衰退让位于长期、强劲、低通胀的扩张，美国房地产市场突飞猛进。
As the United States’ 2000–01, Enron-tinged recession gave way to a long, robust, low-inflation expansion, the American housing market grew in leaps and bounds.
美国梦的重要组成部分是您将享受比上一代人更好的经济生活。从 1950 年代到 80 年代，美国中产阶级白人将“美国梦”与“拥有房屋”共同定义。通过不断发展的文化规范和政府的刺激，梦想的这一方面在 1990 年代和 2000 年代撒下了一张更大的网。银行在房地产市场中发挥了更大的作用。房屋建筑公司的数量和范围都在扩大。政府机构更直接地干预，以降低购房者的交易和利息成本。
Part and parcel of the American Dream is that you will enjoy a better economic life than the preceding generation. From the 1950s through the 1980s, middle-class white Americans codefined “American Dream” with “home ownership.” Via a mix of evolving cultural norms and government prodding, this aspect of the dream threw a wider net in the 1990s and 2000s. Banks played a bigger role in housing markets. Home-building firms expanded in number and reach. Government institutions more directly intervened to reduce transaction and interest costs for home purchasers.
在广泛的政府、金融和文化力量的支持下，一种全新的公司出现了。这些新的“抵押贷款发起公司”确定了潜在的购房者，提供融资让他们买房，然后将由此产生的抵押贷款卖给投资者。这些投资者将抵押贷款捆绑在一起，然后将它们切成小块，在债券市场上流通。这个想法是抵押贷款是最安全的投资（人们会尽其所能不失去他们的房子和他们投入其中的钱）。通过将抵押贷款转化为债券（特别是“抵押贷款支持证券”），更多类型的更多投资者可以将更多资金投入市场，从而降低每个人的融资成本。
Backed by broad-scale government, financial, and cultural forces, an entirely new sort of firm manifested. These new “mortgage origination companies” identified would-be homebuyers, provided the financing to get them into homes, and then sold the resulting mortgages on to investors. Those investors bundled the mortgages together into packages and then sliced them into pieces for circulation on bond markets. The idea was that mortgages were the safest of investments (people will do whatever they can to not lose their home and the money they’ve sunk into it). By turning mortgages into bonds (specifically “mortgage-backed securities”), more investors of more types could put more money into the market, driving financing costs down for everyone.
随着资金不再是曾经的限制因素，信贷条件逐渐变得更加宽松。准购房者不得不付一半首付的日子早已一去不复返了。一半变成了四分之一。四分之一变成了五分之一。五分之一变成了十分之一。十分之一变成了二十分之一。二十分化为乌有。什么都没有了。. . 5%现金返还。信用检查变得不那么严格了。最后他们完全消失了。现在向他们认识的客户发放抵押贷款由于无法支付新房的款项，抵押贷款发起公司在安排房屋销售后的几天甚至几小时内就开始出售抵押贷款，因为担心有人会发现夹具已经结束。抵押贷款支持证券迅速从最安全的投资退化为甚至安然公司都会拒绝的东西。新房主甚至在还款之前就开始拖欠抵押贷款。一切都变得很糟糕。我们知道随后的经济大屠杀是 2007-09 年的金融危机。
With capital no longer being the restrictive factor it once was, credit terms gradually got easier. Long gone were the days when a would-be homebuyer would have to put half down. Half became a quarter. A quarter became a fifth. A fifth became a tenth. A tenth became a twentieth. A twentieth became nothing. Nothing became . . . 5 percent cash back. Credit checks became less strict. Eventually they disappeared altogether. Now issuing mortgages to clients they knew could not service payments on their new homes, the mortgage origination companies started selling their mortgages within days, even hours, of arranging home sales, for fear someone would discover the jig was up. The mortgage-backed securities quickly degraded from the safest of all investments to something even Enron would have balked at. New homeowners started defaulting on their mortgages before they had even made a single payment. It all went belly-up. We know the subsequent economic carnage as the 2007–09 financial crisis.
一个更远距离的例子：
An example with longer reach:
2000 年代的美国无疑是世界上最大的石油消费国和进口国，这使其对全球石油市场的潮起潮落非常敏感。从 2004 年开始，石油市场开始活跃起来。价格在不到四年的时间内翻了两番。如此惊人的增长足以推动美国进行一系列新的创新，以产生更高水平的国内能源供应。
The United States in the 2000s was far and away the world’s largest oil consumer and importer, making it sensitive to the ebb and flow of global oil markets. Starting in 2004, oil markets got a serious flow on. Prices quadrupled in under four years. Such a crushing increase was more than enough motivation to drive a spate of new innovations in America to generate higher levels of domestic energy supplies.
您肯定听说过其中一些新的创新：钻探提供了传统生产技术无法获得的新原油来源，加压注水使烃源岩破裂，使数万亿包原油流向井筒，更好的回收技术减少了 90 多个国家/地区所需的水量%，更好的流体管理消除了系统中的毒性，改进的数据管理使钻井人员能够微调他们的操作，以仅开采非常特定的含有碳氢化合物的点。世界将这些集体进步称为“水力压裂”或“页岩革命”，它们共同使美国成为世界上最大的石油和天然气生产国。
Some of these new innovations you’ve undoubtedly heard of: horizontal drilling provided access to new sources of crude that conventional production techniques could not, pressurized water injection fractured the source rock, enabling trillions of packets of crude oil to flow to the well shaft, better recycling techniques reduced the volume of water required by more than 90 percent, better fluid management removed toxicity from the system, and improved data management enabled drillers to fine-tune their operations to strike only the very specific spots that held hydrocarbons. The world knows these collective advances as either “fracking” or the “shale revolution” and collectively they made the United States the world’s largest oil and natural gas producer.
但大多数人都忽视了页岩的一个方面：金融。
But there’s an aspect to shale most have overlooked: finance.
开发新技术并不便宜。垂直钻探一英里并不便宜。转动垂直钻轴然后水平钻两英里并不便宜。在地表加压液体以裂开钻井下方三英里处的岩石并不便宜。让服务器有时间解释地震后向散射以优化水力压裂过程并不便宜。培训工作人员从事以前从未做过的工作并不便宜。然后，石油行业的所有“正常”部分——最著名的是建设集输管道和铁路基础设施的网络——也不是完全免费的。总而言之，就在 2012 年，从页岩地层中生产一桶石油的成本约为每桶 90 美元。
Developing new technologies isn’t cheap. Drilling down a vertical mile isn’t cheap. Turning that vertical drill shaft and then drilling two horizontal miles isn’t cheap. Pressurizing liquids on the surface to crack apart rock three miles down the drill shaft isn’t cheap. Getting server time to interpret the seismic backscatter in order to optimize the fracking process isn’t cheap. Training crews to do work that has never been done before isn’t cheap. And then all the “normal” parts of the oil industry—most notably building webworks of gathering and distribution pipe and rail infrastructure—isn’t exactly free, either. All in, as recently as 2012 producing a barrel of oil from shale formations cost around $90 a barrel.
在美国很正常，快速发展的行业（如页岩）中的大多数技术创新都是由较小的参与者进行的。如果小公司有一个共同点，那就是他们需要帮助获得资金。但是，将美国在高油价环境下对更多国内石油生产的压倒性战略和经济需求与法定货币时代的金融可能性结合起来，这个问题就烟消云散了。华尔街向页岩油田大肆投放资金：商业贷款、直接贷款、债券、股票购买、金融集团以合资钻井、生产对冲合同的形式直接注入现金。所有这些以及更多的资金都流入了这个不断发展的行业。
As is normal in the United States, most technological innovations in rapidly evolving industries—like shale—are made by the smaller players. If there is one thing smaller companies have in common, it is that they need help accessing capital. But combine the overwhelming American strategic and economic need for more domestic oil production in a high-price environment with the financial possibilities of the fiat currency era and this issue simply melted away. Wall Street spammed the shale patch with money: commercial loans, direct loans, bonds, stock purchases, direct cash infusions from financial groups in the form of drilling joint ventures, production hedging contracts. All these and more funneled capital into the growing industry.
回想起来，并非所有这些都有意义。页岩油井往往会在开采的头几个月内完成大部分生产他们二十年的生命周期。这往往表明资本要么会很快得到偿还。. . 或永远不会。在许多情况下，它肯定被证明是永远不会的。然而十多年来，很少有公司被召集到地毯上。相反，这些小公司能够一次又一次地回到市场，以获得更多的融资，以进行更多的钻探。生产、生产、生产——但不一定是利润——的跑步机具有一种非常熟悉的中国品质。在 1971 年之前，世界上永远不会做出这种反复出现问题的融资决定，但由于它们可以在法定货币世界中做出，因此美国经历了任何油田中石油产量绝对值最大的增长。
In retrospect, not all of it made a great deal of sense. Shale wells tend to kick out the majority of their production in just the first several months of their twentyish-year life cycle. That tends to suggest that the capital will either be repaid quickly . . . or never. In many cases, it definitely proved to be never. Yet for more than a decade, few firms were called to the carpet. Instead, those same small firms were able to go back to the market again and again to secure more financing to enable more drilling. The treadmill of production, production, production—but not necessarily profit—had an eerily familiar Chinese quality to it. Such repeatedly questionable financing decisions would have never been made in the world before 1971, but because they could be made in the world of fiat currencies, the United States experienced the greatest expansion in oil output in absolute terms of any oil patch, ever.
千万不要以为美国的这种挥霍只限于金融、房地产和能源。上一位甚至假装关心财政审慎的美国总统是比尔·克林顿 (Bill Clinton)，他不是以 . . . 审慎。在他的领导下，美国政府确实平衡了联邦预算。然后是乔治·W·布什 (George W. Bush)，他的预算赤字是二战以来最大的。他的继任者巴拉克奥巴马将这些赤字翻了一番。下一个人，唐纳德特朗普，再次将它们加倍。在撰写本文时，也就是 2022 年初，下一位接班人乔·拜登 (Joe Biden) 将自己的政治生命押注在多项支出计划上，如果这些计划获得通过，这些赤字将再次翻一番。
Don’t think for a moment that such profligacy in the United States is limited to finance, real estate, and energy. The last American president to even pretend to care about fiscal prudence was Bill Clinton, a dude not known for . . . prudence. On his watch, the U.S. government did indeed balance the federal budget. Then along came George W. Bush, who ran some of the largest budget deficits since World War II. His successor, Barack Obama, doubled those deficits. The next guy, Donald Trump, doubled them again. At the time of this writing, in early 2022, the next dude in line, Joe Biden, has bet his political life on multiple spending plans that if enacted would double those deficits again.
如果没有法定时代近乎无限的资本，这一切——安然、次级抵押贷款、页岩油或联邦财政赤字，更不用说欧洲共同货币或作为一个国家的现代中国——都不可能实现。
None of this—Enron, subprime, shale, or the federal fiscal deficit, to say nothing of the European common currency or modern China as a country—would have been possible without the near-limitless capital of the fiat age.
灾难是相对的
Disaster Is Relative
对法定时代弱点的这种不那么小的、具有历史意义的沉重抨击的要点有三个：
The point of this not-so-little, historically heavy diatribe into the foibles of the fiat age is threefold:
首先，法定时代使大小经济体、远近国家能够用现金来掩盖他们的问题。与源源不断的低成本资本相比，使这个或那个地方在任何特定时代都能取得成功的因素——成功地理——显得苍白无力。当然，我们已经看到大量法定货币下的金融泡沫，但最重要的一点是，所有这些钱都让经济历史停滞不前。在法令之下，每个地方的每个人都可以成功。只要钱源源不断。
First, the fiat age has enabled economies large and small, countries near and far, to paper over their problems with cash. The factors that enable this or that place to do well in any given age—the Geography of Success—pale in comparison to a bottomless supply of low-cost capital. Sure, we’ve seen plenty of financial bubbles under fiat, but the most important takeaway is that all that money has put economic history on hold. Under fiat, everyone everywhere can be successful. So long as the money keeps coming.
其次，每个人——我是说每个人——都在这样做。当今存在的唯一没有扩大货币供应量的系统是那些有意识地选择放弃经济增长以支持价格稳定的系统。通常，这些地点最近经历了经济冲击，正试图站稳脚跟。在晚期资本主义时代，这样的例外情况非常少，相距很远，而且对更广泛的图景来说微不足道。
Second, everyone—and I mean everyone—is doing it. The only systems in existence today that are not expanding their money supply are those that have consciously chosen to forgo economic growth in favor of price stability. Typically, these are locations that have experienced recent economic shocks and are attempting to find their footing. In the late-capitalism era, such exceptions are very few, very far between, and insignificant to the broader picture.
第三，没有人——我是说没有人——以同样的速度印刷货币。
Third, no one—and I mean no one—is printing currency at the same rate.
是的，美国人可能扩大了他们的货币供应量，超出了完全合理的范围，但请尝试保持一些观点：
Yes, the Americans have probably expanded their money supply more than is entirely reasonable, but try to maintain some perspective:
- 次贷泡沫破灭时，美国的可用房屋数量创下历史新高（约 350 万套），但那只是当时的情况。美国仍然有正的人口增长，所以人们想要那些房子。它们不是搁浅资产。在 2010 年代和 2020 年代初搬进独户住宅的一代是千禧一代——美国历史上人数第二多的一代。大约 1% 的住房仅由于过时、火灾和拆卸，库存每年都会被销毁。到 2021 年，可用房屋数量已降至 70 万套以下，创历史新低。我并不是要摆脱 2000 年代糟糕的资本配置决策，但如果没有次贷脉冲，美国 2020 年代的住房问题将会更加糟糕。
- America had a record number of homes available when the subprime bubble popped (roughly 3.5 million), but that was then. The United States still has positive population growth, so people want those homes. They are not stranded assets. The generation moving into single-family homes in the 2010s and early 2020s are the Millennials—the second-largest generation in U.S. history. And about 1 percent of the housing stock is destroyed every year simply due to obsolescence, fire, and tear-downs. By 2021 the number of homes available had plunged to below 700,000, a record low. I’m not attempting to wave away poor capital allocation decisions from the 2000s, but without the subprime pulse, America’s housing issues in the 2020s would be far, far worse.
- 页岩行业也出现了类似的平衡。信贷条件大量收紧，因为银行变得明智，因为华尔街变得可疑，因为能源市场的价格震荡使任何财务拮据的公司都无法生存。到 2022 年，页岩油运营商的数量与 2016 年相比下降了三分之二。是的，许多小公司依靠廉价信贷持续的时间太长了，但他们的集体努力开发了美国人将依赖的全新一代技术几十年。
- A similar balancing occurred with the shale sector. Credit terms tightened in chunks, because banks wised up, because Wall Street turned dubious, because of price shocks in the energy market that no financially strapped firm could survive. By 2022 the number of shale operators had dropped by two-thirds compared to 2016. Yes, a lot of small companies lasted far too long on the cheap credit, but their collective efforts developed an entire new generation of technologies the Americans will coast on for decades.
- 美国在 2007-9 年金融危机期间的货币扩张是为了防止金融大决战。这是绝对必要的，部分是由于与危机相关的改革，美国银行现在是地球上最健康的银行。相对而言，金融危机的扩张也没有那么大。整个时期的货币扩张总量“仅”约为 1 万亿美元——不到货币供应量的 15%。
- The American monetary expansion during the 2007–9 financial crisis was about preventing financial Armageddon. It was strictly necessary, and in part because of the crisis-related reforms, American banks are now by far the healthiest on the planet. Nor was the financial crisis expansion all that big, relatively speaking. Total monetary expansion for the entire period was “only” about $1 trillion—less than 15 percent of the money supply.
与欧洲相比，欧洲自 2006 年以来理所当然地进行了货币扩张，以维持世界上最不稳定和最不健康的银行业。在不到两年的时间里，欧洲银行业危机的扩大使欧元货币供应量增加了 80%。这不仅仅是关于缓解危机。每当欧洲人和日本人有政治目标要实现时，他们就会定期扩大货币供应量，这一决策过程鼓励大多数非欧洲人和日本人根本不持有或交易他们的货币。因此，尽管欧洲欧元，尤其是日元不再是真正的全球货币，但它们的货币供应量往往超过美国。
Compare that to Europe, where monetary expansion since 2006 has occurred as a matter of course in order to keep alive a banking sector that is among the world’s least stable and healthy. In under two years, the European banking crisis expansion increased the euro money supply by 80 percent. And it isn’t just about crisis mitigation. The Europeans and Japanese regularly expand their money supply whenever they have a political goal to meet, a decision-making process that encourages most people who are not European and Japanese from holding or transacting in their currencies at all. As such, their money supplies have often surpassed that of the United States, despite the fact that both the European euro and especially the Japanese yen are no longer true global currencies.
但真正让银行破产的是中国，在中国，货币扩张是一切事情的标准操作程序。自 2007 年以来——那一年，每个人都开始谈论中国人接管地球——人民币的供应量增加了 800 %以上。
But it is China, where monetary expansion is the standard operating procedure for everything, that has truly broken the bank. Since 2007—the year everyone started talking about the Chinese taking over the planet—the supply of yuan has increased by more than eight hundred percent.
在中国大陆以外，人民币只在香港流行，而且只是因为香港是中国本土与世界其他地区的金融交汇点。在其他任何地方，人民币几乎不存在。中国经济，即使是最极端的中国人自吹自擂，仍然比美国经济小得多，但中国的货币供应量已经超过美国十年了——通常是美国的两倍。因此，人民币当然不是任何人的保值手段。从中国流向美元网络的资本每年经常超过 1 万亿美元。
Outside the mainland, the Chinese yuan is only popular in Hong Kong, and only because Hong Kong serves as the financial intersection between China proper and the rest of the world. Anywhere else, the yuan is nearly nonexistent. The Chinese economy, even by the boasts of the most ultranationalist of Chinese, is still significantly smaller than the American economy, and yet the Chinese money supply has been larger than America’s for a decade—often twice as big. So of course the yuan is a store of value for no one. Capital flight out of China to the U.S. dollar network regularly tops $1 trillion annually.
中国的金融体系及其终端人口结构决定了它不是以消费为导向，甚至不是以出口为导向，而是以贷款为导向。这使得中国容易受到世界任何地方可能影响原材料供应、能源供应或出口路线的任何发展的影响——北京无法影响的发展，更不用说控制了。中国在这条毁灭之路上走了将近半个世纪。这不是任何受到严格控制、具有前瞻性思维、领导能力强的政府都应该遭受的那种冰山一角的灾难。
China’s financial system, paired with its terminal demographics, condemns it to not being consumption-led, or even export-led, but lending-led. That makes China vulnerable to any development anywhere in the world that might impinge raw material supply, energy supply, or export routes—developments Beijing cannot influence, much less control. China has been on this path to destruction for nearly a half century. This is not the sort of iceberg-on-the-horizon disaster that any tightly controlled, forward-thinking, competently led government should fall prey to.
那么，美国人的货币政策是不是玩得太快了？也许。这会产生后果吗？大概。这些后果会舒服吗？可能不会。但欧洲人和日本人已经走到了尽头，而中国人则在飓风中游到海里，一头扎进了作为哥斯拉前门的得克萨斯州大小的漩涡。规模很重要。
So, have the Americans played a bit fast and loose with their monetary policy? Perhaps. Will that have consequences down the line? Probably. Will those consequences be comfortable? Probably not. But it is the Europeans and Japanese who have gone off the deep end, while the Chinese have swum out to sea during a hurricane and dived headfirst into the Texas-sized whirlpool that serves as Godzilla’s front door. Scale matters.
特别是当规则改变时。
Particularly when the rules change.
问题在于法定时代可用资本的普遍激增只是问题的一半。还有第二个更传统的因素，近年来增加了资本供应并抑制了资本成本。它正处于崩溃的过程中。
At issue is that the general surge of capital availability of the fiat age is only half the problem. There is a second, more traditional factor that has amped up capital supplies and smothered capital costs in recent years. And it is in the process of imploding.
更多的终结，Redux
The End of More, Redux
人口统计和资本
Demographics and Capital
这是一个简单的年龄问题。
It is a simple issue of age.
从文明初期到工业时代中期，不同年龄组——儿童、年轻工人、高级工人和退休人员——大致平衡，只是在边缘发生了变化。这使得资本供应非常稳定，即使非常有限。年轻人借钱来刺激他们的消费，他们中的很多人都需要这笔资金。
From the dawn of civilization right up through the mid–Industrial Age, the various age groups—children, young workers, advanced workers, and retirees—existed in a rough balance that only changed at the margin. That made for a very stable, if very limited, capital supply. Young people borrow to fuel their spending, and there are a lot of them demanding that capital.
成熟的工人往往花得更少，同时又是所在社会的富人。他们在一生中积累了财富，同时支出却比年轻时少。他们的财务产出——无论是以投资还是纳税的形式——构成了每个社会的支柱。但简单的死亡率意味着它们并不大量存在。储蓄者很少，花钱的人很多。供需。借贷成本居高不下。
Mature workers tend to spend less, while simultaneously being the rich people of their societies. They have accrued wealth over their life spans, while simultaneously spending less than they did when they were young. Their financial output—whether in the form of investments made or taxes paid—forms the backbone of every society. But simple mortality means they don’t exist in large numbers. Few savers, many spenders. Supply and demand. Borrowing costs stay high.
工业化改变了游戏规则。早期的工业化国家经历了更长的寿命和更低的儿童死亡率，导致他们的人口大约增加了两倍。与此同时，工业化引发了大规模城市化，最终导致家庭规模缩小和人口老龄化。那里的关键词是“及时”。并非每个人都在同一时间开始或以相同的速度看到人口结构的变化。通常，早期的工业化者进展最慢。
Industrialization changed the game. The early industrializers experienced longer life spans and lower child mortality, leading to a rough tripling of their populations. At the same time, industrialization triggered mass urbanization, which in time led to smaller families and aging populations. The key phrase there is “in time.” Not everyone started at the same time or saw changes to population structures at the same rate. As a rule, the early industrializers proceeded the most slowly.
然后美国人利用骑士团将全球化和稳定扩展到包括中国在内的整个人类大家庭。每个国家都开始走上工业化和城市化的道路。后来者能够跳过工业化进程的整个阶段，从铁直接发展到钢，从铝到玻璃纤维，从铜管到 PVC 再到软管，从固定电话到手机再到智能手机。一个国家开始城市化进程的时间越晚，城市化进程展开的速度就越快，出生率下降的速度也就越快。
Then the Americans used the Order to extend globalization and stability to the entire human family, China included. Every country started down the path toward industrialization and urbanization. The latecomers were able to jump over entire phases of the industrialization process, progressing directly from iron to steel, from aluminum to fiberglass, from copper pipes to PVC to flexible tubing, from landlines to cell phones to smartphones. The later a country began the urbanization process, the faster that urbanization process unfolded and the faster that birth rates crashed.
自冷战结束以来，几乎所有人都变得更加富有，但对金融界来说更重要的是，现代化进程的时间紧缩性意味着所有人都变老了。在 1990 年到 2020 年的世界里，这一直是美好的，因为这意味着世界上所有最富有和最向上流动的国家或多或少都处于老龄化过程的资本丰富阶段。在这三个十年期间，有很多国家拥有很多40 多岁到 60 多岁，这个年龄段产生的资本最多。他们的投资美元、欧元、日元和人民币涌入该体系，往往无视国际边界。总的来说，他们的储蓄推高了资本供应，同时降低了资本成本。为了一切。无处不在。从 1990 年到 2020 年，这些因素的广泛融合为我们带来了人类历史上最便宜的资本供应和最快的经济增长。除了法定时代的普遍疯狂之外。在秩序时代的高速增长之上。
Since the Cold War’s end, nearly all peoples have gotten richer, but more important for the world of finance, the time-compressed nature of the modernization process means all peoples have gotten older. In the world of 1990 through 2020, this has been just peachy because it meant all the richest and most upwardly mobile countries of the world were in the capital-rich stage of their aging process more or less at the same time. Throughout that three-decade period there have been a lot of countries with a lot of late-forty- through early-sixty-somethings, the age group that generates the most capital. Their investment dollars and euros and yen and yuan have flooded out into the system, often ignoring international borders. Collectively, their savings has pushed the supply of capital up while pushing the cost of capital down. For everything. Everywhere. Between 1990 and 2020 this broad convergence of factors brought us the cheapest capital supplies and fastest economic growth in the history of our species. On top of the general craziness of the fiat age. On top of the hypergrowth of the Order era.
抵押贷款利率一直处于历史最低水平，先进的政府有时能够以负利率借款，而主要股票市场继续探索越来越高的领域。无处不在的、历史上廉价的资本也降低了任何想要启动新生产线、清理新农田、编写新软件或建造新船的人的融资成本。过去十年左右的工业产出和技术进步的爆炸式增长在很大程度上是由于布雷顿森林体系挥之不去和成熟工人大量供过于求的这一人口时刻的结合。还有他们的钱。
Mortgage rates have been the lowest in history and advanced governments have on occasion been able to borrow at negative rates, while the major stock markets continue to explore higher and higher ground. Omnipresent, historically cheap capital has also pushed down financing costs for anyone who wants to start a new production line or clear new agricultural land or write new software or build a new ship. The explosion in industrial output and technological advances of the past decade or so are largely due to the combination of the lingering Bretton Woods system and this demographic moment of a huge oversupply of mature workers. And their money.
同样的资本也负责最近的愚蠢爆炸。2021 年初，一群游戏玩家向视频游戏投入了大量资金平台 GameStop，它曾一度成为美国最有价值的公司之一，尽管它即将申请破产。像比特币这样的加密货币不受政府支持，不易兑换，无法用于支付，没有内在价值，主要由寻求结束制裁的中国巨头创造，但所有加密货币的总价值在超过2万亿美元。我个人最喜欢的是一种叫做 Dogecoin 的东西，它的字面意思是作为一个笑话来强调加密货币投资者可能是多么愚蠢。有时，狗狗币的总价值已超过 500 亿美元。所有这一切以及更多都是近乎中国规模的教科书式过度资本化。当资本足够便宜时，连猪都能飞。
The same capital is also responsible for recent explosions of stupid. In early 2021 a bunch of gamers hurled so much capital into the video game platform GameStop that it briefly became one of America’s most valuable firms, despite being about to file for bankruptcy. Cyptocurrencies like Bitcoin are not backed by a government, are not readily exchangeable, are not useful in making payments, have no intrinsic value, and are primarily generated by Chinese magnates seeking an end run around sanctions, yet the combined value of all cryptos is in excess of $2 trillion. My personal favorite is something called Dogecoin, which was literally formed as a joke to highlight how idiotic crypto investors could be. At times the total value of dogecoins has topped $50 billion. All of this and more is textbook overcapitalization of a nearly Chinese scale. When capital is cheap enough, even pigs can fly.
一次。
Once.
回到人口统计。人不会因为时代变好而停止衰老。美国缓慢老龄化的人口结构、日本和欧洲中度老龄化的人口结构以及发达发展中国家快速老龄化的人口结构都将在 2020 年代和 2030 年代实现大规模退休。当他们退休时——当他们全部同时退休时——他们将停止提供为我们的世界提供动力的资本。大约在同一时间，美国不再高举天花板。
Back to demographics. People don’t stop aging just because times are good. The slowly aging demography of the United States and the moderately aging demographies of Japan and the Europeans and the quickly aging demographies of the advanced developing world all converge on mass retirement in the 2020s and 2030s. And when they retire—when all of them retire at once—they will stop providing the capital that has fueled our world. At about the same time the United States stops holding up the ceiling.
有两件大事由此而来。
Two big things come from this.
首先，无论经济的基础现实如何，这种新发展的大部分都会产生更大的生产和更高的消费。这鼓励政府暴饮暴食（想想奥巴马医改或特朗普政府的联邦预算或希腊债务危机）。这鼓励了消费者的狂欢（想想意大利银行债务或美国次级房地产）。这鼓励了无数产品的过度生产，这些产品的经济效益可能值得怀疑（想想中国制造业或互联网泡沫的繁荣/萧条）。廉价信贷让通常无法参与游戏的个人和公司产生不可战胜的幻觉。但是，在美好时光中感觉自然、令人兴奋和可持续的东西不会——也不可能——永远持续下去。当资金停止流动并且融资成本增加时，整个事情就会崩溃。
First, much of this new development generates greater production and higher consumption regardless of the underpinning realities of an economy. This encourages government bingeing (think Obamacare or the Trump administration’s federal budget or the Greek debt crisis). This encourages consumer bingeing (think Italian bank debt or American subprime real estate). This encourages overproduction of an endless variety of products that might have questionable economics (think Chinese manufacturing or the dot-com boom/bust). Cheap credit grants people and firms who normally couldn’t be in the game the illusion of undefeatability. But what feels natural and heady and sustainable during good times does not—cannot—last forever. When the money stops flowing and financing costs increase, the whole thing comes crashing down.
其次，它正在崩溃。这里没有地缘政治预测。这是基础数学。世界成熟工人群体中的大多数男性和女性——那些至关重要的婴儿潮一代——将在 2020 年代上半叶退休。退休人员不再有新的收入可以投资。
Second, it is so coming crashing down. There’s no geopolitical forecast here. It is basic math. The majority of the men and women in the world’s mature worker bulge—those all-important Baby Boomers—will hit retirement in the first half of the 2020s. Retirees no longer have new income to invest.
对于金融界来说，这比听起来更糟糕。
That’s worse than it sounds for the world of finance.
不仅没有什么新的东西可以投资，而且他们所做的投资往往从高收益股票、公司债券和外国资产重新分配到防通胀、防股市崩盘和货币崩盘的投资——证明。退出中国科技创业基金、卢旺达基础设施债券和玻利维亚锂项目，加入国库券、货币市场和现金。否则，单一的市场调整可能会抹去数十年的积蓄，而现在退休的人可能会失去一切。这对个人来说是明智和合乎逻辑的，但对于更广泛的系统来说并不那么热门，原因有二。
Not only is there nothing new to be invested, but what investments they do have tend to be reapportioned from high-earning stocks, corporate bonds, and foreign assets to investments that are inflation-proof, stock market crash-proof, and currency crash-proof. Out with the Chinese tech start-up fund, Rwandan infrastructure bonds, and Bolivian lithium projects, and in with T-bills, money markets, and cash. Otherwise a single market correction could wipe out decades of savings and the now-retiree could lose everything. This is smart and logical for the individual, but not so hot for the broader system, for two reasons.
第一个很明显。信用是现代经济的命脉。如果您是一家公司，借款可以帮助您支付工资、资金扩张、购买机器和建造新设施。每个 Jane 或 Joe 每天都在使用信贷：大学贷款、汽车贷款、抵押贷款、房屋净值贷款、信用卡。润滑使几乎一切成为可能。在没有信用的情况下，为数不多的购买商品的方法之一是预付全额现金。你需要多长时间才能赚到足够的钱来支付你的汽车、大学教育或你的房子——预先全额支付？
The first is pretty obvious. Credit is the lifeblood of a modern economy. If you’re a company, borrowing helps you meet payroll, fund expansions, purchase machinery, and build new facilities. Every Jane or Joe uses credit every day: college loans, car loans, mortgage loans, home equity loans, credit cards. It is the lubrication that makes pretty much everything possible. Without credit, one of the few methods of purchasing goods is with cash, up front and in full. How long would it take you to earn enough to pay for your car, your college education, or your house—up front and in full?
提高信贷的成本，一切都会变慢，前提是它不会简单地停下来。2021财年，美国政府支付了约5500亿美元的利息。将政府借贷成本提高一个百分点，而这些付款将增加一倍。美国政府可以改变这种增长。但是巴西呢？还是俄罗斯？还是印度？让我们让它更个性化。将标准抵押贷款的利率提高 2.5%——这将使抵押贷款利率仍远低于半个世纪的平均水平——你的每月还款额将增加一半。这足以让大多数人买不起房。
Raise the costs of that credit and everything slows down, assuming it doesn’t simply grind to a stop. In the 2021 fiscal year, the United States government paid about $550 billion in interest. Raise government borrowing costs by a single percentage point and those payments double. The United States government can swing that sort of increase. But what about Brazil? Or Russia? Or India? Let’s make this more personal. Raise the interest rate on a standard mortgage loan by 2.5 percent—which would make mortgage rates still well below the half-century average—and your monthly payment increases by half. That’s more than enough to put home purchases out of reach of most people.
第二个不太明显，但同样引人注目。成熟的工人不仅会产生大量收入和资本；他们交了很多税。近几十年来，整个世界，尤其是发达国家都有大量成熟的工人，这使得政府金库变得空前充裕。太好了！它支付教育、执法、医疗保健、基础设施和救灾等费用。
The second is less obvious, but equally as noticeable. Mature workers don’t only generate a lot of income and capital; they pay a lot of taxes. The world in general and the advanced world in particular has had loads of mature workers in recent decades, making government coffers the flushest they have ever been. That’s great! It pays for things like education and law enforcement and health care and infrastructure and disaster relief.
或者至少在那些成熟的工人退休之前这很好。退休人员不是向系统缴费，而是以养老金和医疗保健费用的形式从系统中提取费用。将 2000 年代和 2010 年代税收沉重、成熟工人密集的人口结构替换为 2020 年代和 2030 年代税收较少、退休人员密集的人口结构，二战后时代的治理模式不会简单地破产，他们成为社会自杀协议。
Or at least it’s great until those mature workers retire. Instead of paying into the system, retirees draw from the system in the form of pensions and health care costs. Replace a tax-heavy, mature-worker-heavy demographic of the 2000s and 2010s with the tax-poor, retiree-heavy demographic of the 2020s and 2030s and the governing models of the post–World War II era do not simply go broke, they become societal suicide pacts.
再一次，最近几十年是人类历史上最好的时代，我们永远不会倒退。更糟糕的是，我们并没有低估回归 1950 年代风格的政府服务的后果——那时年轻工人、成熟工人和退休人员之间存在相对平衡。对于世界上的大部分地区，在大多数政府甚至还没有提供服务之前，我们就已经看到了18世纪50 年代风格的政府服务，但没有随之而来的经济增长，让人们有机会照顾自己。
Once again, recent decades have been the best time in human history, and we are never going back. Even worse, we’re not looking down the maw of a return to 1950s-style government services—at that point there was relative balance between young workers, mature workers, and retirees. For much of the world, we’re looking down the maw of 1850s-style government services before most governments even offered services, but without the attendant economic growth that would allow populations a chance to take care of themselves.
信用纲要
A Credit Compendium
加上法定时代的奢侈和夸张，再加上人口时刻的过度和爆发，我们经历了人类历史上最大的信贷激增。在美国，我们知道这些激增中最大的一部分是次贷时代。从 2000 年次级抵押贷款行业诞生到 2007 年结束，美国的信贷总量大约翻了一番。在经济站稳脚跟之前的两年里，这种非理性繁荣导致的崩溃使美国 GDP 减少了大约 5%。
Add the extravagances and exaggerations of the fiat era to the excesses and eruptions of the demographic moment and we have experienced the largest credit surges in human history. In the United States we know the biggest chunk of those surges as the subprime era. From 2000, when the subprime industry was birthed, to 2007, when it ended, total credit in the United States roughly doubled. The ensuing crash from such irrational exuberance knocked roughly 5 percent off of U.S. GDP in the two years before the economy found its footing.
信贷翻倍。百分之五的经济下降。这是一个很好的基线。
Doubling of credit. Five percent economic drop. That’s a good baseline.
现在让我们看看其他人。. .
Now let’s look at everyone else . . .
- 每个人都听说过希腊的烂摊子。尽管没有开会，希腊人还是获准加入欧元区。. . 出色地 。. . 任何关于债务和赤字的要求。然后，他们开始表现得像一个大学辍学生，挥舞着远方继父母的白金信用卡。总信贷在短短七年内扩大了七倍。该法案最终到期，该国崩溃了，在接下来的三年里，希腊经济的崩溃幅度是美国在大萧条时期的两倍。到 2019 年，情况有所好转。. . 如果不是更好，那么至少不会那么糟糕。输入新冠病毒。作为一个依赖旅游业的经济体，希腊再次跌入自由落体状态。如果这个国家继续存在，它将成为其他人的监护人。
- Everyone has heard about the mess that is Greece. The Greeks were admitted into the eurozone despite not meeting . . . well . . . any of the requirements in regard to debts and deficits. They then proceeded to act like a college dropout wielding a distant stepparent’s platinum credit card. Total credit expanded by a factor of seven in just seven years. The bill eventually came due, the country crashed, and during the following three years the Greek economy proceeded to implode by twice as much in relative terms as the United States did during the Great Depression. By 2019 things were looking . . . if not better, then at least not quite as bad. Enter COVID. As a tourism-dependent economy, Greece once again dropped into free fall. If the country continues to exist at all, it will be as a ward of someone else.
- 不出所料，德国正好相反。德国人在金融交易中非常保守，无论是作为人民还是作为政府。要获得抵押贷款资格，首先需要将类似抵押贷款的定期付款存入一个隔离的银行账户数年，以证明态度和诚意。正因如此，德国人避免了 2007-9 年金融危机中困扰欧洲大部分地区的那种灾难性金融崩溃。许多结果之一是德国经济率先反弹，反弹速度最快，导致整个欧洲大陆的公司将鸡蛋放入德国的篮子里，而欧洲其他国家则萎靡不振。为德国人欢呼两声！但只有两个。在欧洲中心建立一切德国事物激起了整个欧洲的不满。
- Germany, unsurprisingly, is the polar opposite. The Germans are remarkably conservative in their financial dealings, both as a people and a government. Qualifying for a mortgage first requires making regular mortgage-like payments into a sequestered bank account for several years to prove attitude and bona fides. As such, the Germans avoided the sort of catastrophic financial collapses that bedeviled much of Europe in the 2007–9 financial crisis. One result among many was that the German economy bounced back first and fastest, leading firms across the Continent to put their eggs in the German basket while the rest of Europe withered. Two cheers for the Germans! But only two. The establishment of all things German at Europe’s center bred resentment throughout Europe.
- 在英国， 2007-9 年的金融危机激发了经济和种族民族主义者的勇气，推动将英国从欧盟中分离出来，这种怨恨在很大程度上是根深蒂固的。作为随后斗争的一部分，英国的政治右翼和左翼都发生了内爆。民粹主义者最终控制了英国的政治右翼，并带领英国度过了我们今天所知的英国脱欧的偶然过程，而左翼则一度落入几乎没有粉饰过的新法西斯主义者的控制之下。
- A far from insignificant amount of that resentment put down roots in the United Kingdom, where the 2007–9 financial crisis emboldened economic and ethnic nationalists to push for separating the kingdom from the European Union. As part of the ensuing struggle, Britain’s political right and left both imploded. Populists ultimately took control of the British political right and led the kingdom through the haphazard process we know today as Brexit, while the left fell under the control of barely whitewashed neofascists for a time.
- 匈牙利在 2000 年代的信贷增长是欧洲最大的，增长了八倍. 大部分资金以一种让美国次级抵押贷款金融家脸红的方式涌入房地产市场，让收入最低或信用记录低的人住进他们无法假装负担得起的房屋。更糟糕的是，大部分贷款都是外币，因此当不可避免的货币波动发生时，即使是在正常情况下能够负担得起住房的匈牙利人也会突然看到他们的抵押贷款增加了一倍。随之而来的经济和金融混乱加剧了反对形形色色外来者的政治格局，使总理维克托·奥尔班得以控制该国的整个金融和政治空间。出于所有意图和目的，截至 2022 年，匈牙利不再是民主国家。
- The credit build in Hungary in the 2000s was among Europe’s biggest, expanding by a factor of eight. Much of that capital flooded into the housing market in a way that would make American subprime financiers blush, putting people with minimal income or credit histories into homes they could not pretend to afford. Making matters worse, most of the loans were in foreign currencies, so when the inevitable currency swings occurred, even Hungarians who were able to afford their homes under normal circumstances suddenly saw their mortgage payments double. The ensuing economic and financial chaos hardened the political landscape against outsiders of all flavors, enabling Prime Minister Viktor Orban to seize control of the country’s entire financial and political space. For all intents and purposes, as of 2022 Hungary is no longer a democracy.
- 新加坡拥有巨大的信用签名，自 2000 年以来信贷增长了五倍。但新加坡是一个金融中心，因此不断投资于其以外的地方。它的大部分“私人信贷”都集中在外国经济体中。此外，新加坡还有一个政府投资机构——淡马锡——负责将这个城市国家的大量资金用于海外项目。因素那些物品出来了，图片看起来并不那么起泡。也就是说，新加坡位于世界上最繁忙的贸易路线马六甲海峡，是世界上最大的转运中心，其油箱储存和管理如此多的石油的分配，以至于它们构成了全球价格标准. 如果全球贸易的速度发生任何变化，无论这个城市国家的财政管理得多么好，新加坡以贸易为中心的经济在短期内都不可避免地会受到影响。
- Singapore has a big credit signature, with a fivefold increase in credit since 2000. But Singapore is a financial center and so is constantly investing in places outside of itself. Much of its “private credit” is wrapped up in foreign economies. Additionally, Singapore has a government investment agency—Temasek—that is responsible for funneling a lot of the city-state’s money into projects abroad. Factor those items out and the picture doesn’t look all that bubbly. That said, Singapore sits on the Strait of Malacca—the world’s busiest trade route—and serves as the world’s largest transshipment center, to such a degree that its fuel tanks hold and manage the distribution of so much petroleum that they constitute a global price standard. Should anything happen to the velocity of global trade, Singapore’s trade-centric economy could not help but suffer in the short term regardless of how well managed the city-state’s finances happen to be.
- 凭借相当多元化的经济、欢迎移民的政府政策以及足以满足中国永不满足的需求的大量矿产储备，澳大利亚已经避免了一代人的经济衰退。其他人注意到，外国资金大量涌入该国，以利用人类历史上持续时间最长的经济增长。这使大澳大利亚成为西方国家中信用过度最高的国家，尚未经历信用崩溃。自 2000 年以来，信贷增长了六倍。住房和家庭债务当然是意料之中的问题，但信贷流入已将澳元推高至令人不安的不可持续高位，削弱了采矿业以外的每个经济部门的竞争力。政府采取监管措施减少需求的任何努力都被税法所淹没，该税法不仅鼓励财产所有权，而且实际上鼓励那些已经拥有住宅物业的人购买更多。这在任何地方都是一个问题，但在澳大利亚尤为严重。奥兹似乎是一个拥有大量土地的地方，但内陆地区对住宅房地产毫无用处。绝大多数澳大利亚人居住在不到 10 个基本不相连的都市区，这大大限制了可用性并推高了建造新住房存量的成本。这会吹的。问题是什么时候？
- With the combination of a fairly diversified economy, government policies welcoming immigration, and a bevy of mineral reserves big enough to feed insatiable Chinese demand, Australia has avoided recession for a generation. Others noticed, and foreign money has spammed into the country to take advantage of the longest continuous period of economic growth in human history. That has turned the Great Down Under into the most overcredited of the Western countries to not yet experience a credit collapse. Credit has increased sixfold since 2000. Housing and household debt are of course the expected bugaboos, but the credit inflows have pushed the Australian dollar up to uncomfortably unsustainable highs, eroding the competitiveness of every economic sector outside of mining. Any effort the government has taken to decrease demand with regulatory hammers has been overwhelmed by a tax code that not only encourages property ownership, but in fact encourages those already owning residential property to purchase more. This would be a problem anywhere, but in Australia it is particularly acute. Oz might seem like a place with a lot of land, but the Outback is beyond useless to residential real estate. The vast bulk of the Aussie population lives in fewer than ten largely disconnected metro regions, sharply limiting availability and driving up the cost of building new housing inventory. This will blow. The question is when?
- 在哥伦比亚，从 2003 年开始的十年间，信贷增长了五倍，但哥伦比亚的一切都是特例。卷入西半球上个世纪大部分时间里最严重的内战，一个特别暴力的时期被推经济（包括信贷可用性）在 1990 年代后期跌落悬崖。2003-14 年的大部分信贷扩张与战争的进展齐头并进：随着哥伦比亚人重新制定和巩固他们的政治空间和军事战略，政府成功地将他们的军事对手包围在越来越小的飞地中，直到获得最终的和平2015 年的交易和事实上的投降。这种政治和军事复苏反映在经济复苏上。哥伦比亚的信贷“狂欢”，如果有的话，是为了收复失地。未来的挑战将是通过向战争双方证明不互相开枪对商业有利来赢得和平。最有可能的路径？所有人都可以轻松获得信贷，以激发基础设施发展和消费者活动。哥伦比亚的信贷狂潮并非过去。它在它的未来。
- In Colombia credit expanded by a factor of five in a single ten-year period beginning in 2003, but everything about Colombia is a special case. Enmeshed in the Western Hemisphere’s worst civil war for the better part of the past century, a particularly violent period pushed the economy (credit availability included) off the cliff in the late 1990s. Much of the 2003–14 credit expansion went hand in hand with progress in the war: as the Colombians reformulated and consolidated their political space and military strategy, the government succeeded in boxing their military opponents into smaller and smaller enclaves, until securing an ultimate peace deal and de facto surrender in 2015. This political and military recovery was mirrored by an economic recovery. Colombia’s credit “binge” was, if anything, about regaining lost ground. The challenge moving forward will be to win the peace by demonstrating to those on both sides of the war that not shooting at one another is good for business. The most likely path? Easy credit for all, to spark infrastructure development and consumer activity. Colombia’s credit binge isn’t in its past. It is in its future.
- 印度尼西亚是一个我倾向于看好的国家，原因有很多：庞大、年轻、向上流动的人口；一个设计上专注于人口稠密（过度）的爪哇岛的政府，使其能够集中精力在一个相当具体和政治统一的地理区域；广泛的能源安全；横跨世界上最多产的贸易路线的绝佳位置；一方面靠近澳大利亚和新西兰的大型矿产和农产品出口国，另一方面靠近新加坡、泰国和马来西亚的互补工业和金融伙伴。为此，我添加了一个令人惊讶的保守信用状况。是的，总的来说这个东南亚国家的信贷增长了七倍多，但经济增长却超过了它。回到 2000 年，整体信贷等于 GDP——这对于像印度尼西亚这样贫穷、幅员辽阔的国家来说通常会让人有点担心。但是，尽管在接下来的 17 年里绝对信贷逐年上升，但信贷占整体经济的比例实际上下降了三分之一。印度尼西亚仍然面临一系列重大挑战——熟练劳动力不足、摇摇欲坠的基础设施、腐败（排名靠前或位列榜首）——但该国的过度信贷远没有标题数字所暗示的那么令人担忧。
- Indonesia is a country I tend to be bullish about for a mix of reasons: a large, young, upwardly mobile population; a government that by design focuses on the densely (over)populated island of Java, enabling it to concentrate its efforts on a fairly specific and politically unified geography; broad-scale energy security; an excellent location astride the world’s most prolific trade routes; and proximity to the massive mineral and agricultural exporters of Australia and New Zealand on one hand, and to the complementary industrial and financial partners of Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia on the other. To this I add a surprisingly conservative credit profile. Yes, overall credit in the Southeast Asian country has risen by a factor of more than seven, but economic growth has outpaced it. Back in 2000 overall credit was equal to GDP—something that would normally be more than a little worrying for a poor, sprawling country like Indonesia. But despite year-on-year rises in absolute credit for the next seventeen years, the ratio of credit to the overall economy has actually fallen by a third. Indonesia still faces a bevy of significant challenges—insufficient skilled labor, rickety infrastructure, corruption (which sits either near the top or at the top of the list)—but the country’s overcrediting is far less concerning than the headline figure would suggest.
- 巴西的信用状况是希腊的合理呼应：六倍增长，在 2014 年达到顶峰。在那一年，投资者情绪和巴西政治体系同时崩溃，引发了政治危机和深度衰退，在撰写本文时，这种情况没有减弱的迹象。更糟糕的是，巴西的宪法和货币只能追溯到 1990 年代。这不仅是现代巴西的第一次真正的政治和经济危机，而且是一场全面的宪政危机，它打击了使巴西成为巴西的一切事物的基石。假设巴西政治体系在短期内重生（目前还没有迹象表明）并且巴西的管理机构没有遭受额外的损害（这似乎纯粹是幻想），巴西将面临多年严重衰退只是为了从信贷过度扩张中恢复过来。巴西并没有低头看着失去的十年，而是低头看着两个。至少。
- The credit picture of Brazil is a reasonable echo of Greece: a sixfold increase, peaking in 2014. In that year investor sentiment and the Brazilian political system broke at the same time, triggering a political crisis and deep recession that at the time of this writing shows no sign of abating. Making matters worse, Brazil’s constitution and currency only date back to the 1990s. Not only is this modern Brazil’s first true political and economic crisis, but it is a full-blown constitutional crisis that hits at the very bedrock of everything that makes Brazil Brazil. Assuming for the moment that the Brazilian political system regenerates in short order (and there is no sign of that) and that Brazil’s governing institutions suffer no additional damage (and that seems sheer fantasy), Brazil faces years of severe recession simply to recover from their credit overexpansion. Brazil isn’t looking down the maw of a lost decade, but instead at two. At least.
- 鉴于它在过去 50 年中一直是世界上最大的石油出口国，因此当人们想到沙特阿拉伯时，通常不会想到“信用”一词。然而，沙特人已经非常成功地利用他们的石油收入流为其系统的所有部分获得大量信贷，自 2000 年以来产生了 750% 的信贷繁荣。由于这种信贷得到了持续不断的收入的支持，它可能问题不像巴西或澳大利亚那么严重——当然也不像希腊那么糟糕。但大部分功劳要么流向了沙漠中的虚荣项目，要么流向了为购买公民忠诚度而对人口进行的补贴。当流动中断时——它会中断——忠诚度就会崩溃。对沙特领导人来说幸运的是，该国的内部安全部门是世界上最有效的。. . 在平息异议。
- Given that it has been the world’s largest oil exporter for the past fifty straight years, the word “credit” isn’t what normally comes to mind when one thinks of Saudi Arabia. Yet the Saudis have quite successfully leveraged their oil income stream to acquire rafts of credit for all portions of their system, generating a credit boom of 750 percent since 2000. As this credit is backed by unrelenting income, it probably is not as problematic as the situation in Brazil or Australia—and certainly not as bad as Greece. But most of the credit has gone either to vanity projects in the desert, or to subsidies for the population in order to purchase citizen loyalty. When the flow breaks—and it will—that loyalty will crumble. Luckily for the Saudi leadership, the country’s internal security services are among the world’s most effective . . . at quelling dissent.
- 自 2000 年以来，印度的信贷增长了 10 倍，一路上几乎没有下降。经济扩张的稳步鼓声使印度在政治上比其持续不断的饥荒以及宗教和种族流失所暗示的要平静得多。当修正不可避免地到来时，它将是史诗般的。我完全有能力出于地缘政治和人口统计的原因看好印度，同时警告一场严重的金融危机。
- Credit in India is up by a cool factor of ten since 2000, with barely a dip along the way. The steady drumbeat of economic expansion has made India a far calmer place politically than its constant bouts of famine and religious and racial churn would suggest. When the correction inevitably arrives, it will be epic. I’m perfectly capable of being bullish on India for reasons geopolitical and demographic, while simultaneously warning of a helluva financial crisis.
- 在土耳其情况变得复杂了。从 2000 年到 2013 年，信贷总额增长了 12 倍以上——这是世界上增长最快、持续时间最长的一次。繁荣为总理（现任总统）雷杰普·塔伊普·埃尔多安提供了巩固对一个经常难以驾驭的体系的控制所需的政治资本，结束了他自己的安纳托利亚宗教保守派、大伊斯坦布尔地区的亲西方现代化派、以及将自己视为国家卫士的世俗化军队。现在只有埃尔多安了。但在 2013 年，信贷扩张停止了。经济合法性的丧失，来自叙利亚内战的 300 万难民的压力，以及来自和针对欧洲、俄罗斯、伊拉克、而美国则意味着埃尔多安的统治变得脆弱、严厉，而且越来越独裁。而这一切在土耳其遭受不可避免的信用修正之前。
- In Turkey the picture is getting complicated. Between 2000 and 2013, total credit increased by more than a factor of twelve—one of the sharpest and most sustained increases in the world. The boom granted Prime Minister (and now President) Recep Tayyip Erdogan the political capital required to consolidate control over an often-fractious system, ending decades of uncomfortable cohabitation between his own Anatolian religious conservatives, the pro-Western modernizers of the Greater Istanbul region, and a secularized military that saw itself as the guardian of the state. Now there is only Erdogan. But in 2013 the credit expansion stopped in its tracks. The loss of economic legitimacy, the pressure of 3 million refugees from the Syrian civil war, and rising geopolitical hostility from and toward Europe, Russia, Iraq, and the United States mean Erdogan’s rule has become brittle, harsh, and increasingly authoritarian. And all that before Turkey suffers the inevitable credit correction.
- 在 2022 年 2 月 28 日添加本段时，作为对乌克兰战争的惩罚，俄罗斯正在从全球金融中挖出甜瓜，包括俄罗斯中央银行。当你读到这篇文章时，世界将会有一个关于真正的金融崩溃的迷人而可怕的案例研究。俄罗斯也没有完成。受人口老龄化和放弃教育下一代的制度的困扰，俄罗斯的信用崩溃只是能够终结俄罗斯国家的众多因素之一。问题不在于俄罗斯人会不会出手——俄罗斯入侵乌克兰就是证明——而是，他们还会攻击谁？过度信用的国家要当心。任何数量的作为或不作为都可能导致信用崩溃。他们不需要一场战争。或者制裁。
- At the time of this paragraph’s addition on February 28, 2022, Russia is being melon-scooped out of global finance as punishment for the Ukraine War, the Russian Central Bank included. By the time you read this, the world will have a fascinating, horrific case study of true financial disintegration. Nor is Russia done. Beset with a population aging into decrepitude and a system that has given up educating the next generation, Russia’s credit collapse is but one of a phalanx of factors capable of ending the Russian state. The question isn’t will the Russians go out swinging—Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is testament to that—but instead, who else will they swing at? Over-credited countries beware. Credit collapses can be caused by any number of actions or inactions. They do not require a war. Or sanctions.
- 不必多说，但中国绝对的金融井喷已经造成了人类历史上规模最大、最不可持续的信贷繁荣，无论是在绝对指标上还是在相对指标上。中国人将像进入现代世界一样退出现代世界：轰动一时。唯一的问题是什么时候。如果我有答案，你就不会读这本书了，因为我不会在编辑中苦苦挣扎，而是在彼得维尔京群岛消磨时光。
- Not to belabor the point, but the absolute financial blowout that is China has generated the largest and most unsustainable credit boom in human history both in absolute and relative measures. The Chinese will exit the modern world just as they entered it: with a big splash. The only question is when. If I had the answer to that you wouldn’t be reading this book, because instead of struggling through edits I’d be idling away my days on the Peter Virgin Islands.
骗取未来的融资失败
Finagling Future Financing Failures
在法令失败和人口紧缩之间，廉价、容易、无处不在的金融时代正在结束。影响和结果不仅在性质上而且在应用上也会有所不同。
Between fiat failures and the demographic crunch, the days of cheap, easy, omnipresent finance are ending. Impacts and outcomes will vary not only in nature, but also in application.
我们当然需要从改变后的成功地域开始。在任何资本受限的世界中，更多的资金往往会投向那些唾手可得的地方和人群。与山区或热带地区相比，在平坦的温带地区建造和维护基础设施更容易、成本更低。同样，为已经受过教育的人群维持技能组合比提高低技能水平更容易、成本更低。在晚期秩序的高资本环境下，这些简单的规则变得模糊，因为只有 So。很多。钱！那就是结束。在 2020 年代和 2030 年代及以后，我们在整个历史上看到的更熟悉的模式将以报复性的方式重新出现，一些地区比其他地区更能产生和运用资本。北欧越过南欧越过印度越过俄罗斯越过巴西越过中东越过撒哈拉以南非洲。
We of course need to begin with changed Geographies of Success. In any capital-constrained world, more money tends to be applied to locations and populations that have a lot of low-hanging fruit. Infrastructure is easier and cheaper to construct and maintain in flat, temperate zones than in mountains or tropics. Similarly, it is easier and cheaper to maintain skill sets for populations that are already educated than to boost low skill levels. Under the high-capital environment of the late Order, these sorts of simple rules blurred because there was just So. Much. Money! That is ending. In the 2020s and 2030s and beyond, the more familiar patterns we’ve seen throughout history will reassert themselves with a vengeance, with some regions better able to generate and apply capital than others. Northern Europe over southern Europe over India over Russia over Brazil over the Middle East over sub-Saharan Africa.
技术将变得一团糟。服务器场、智能手机和软件不仅仅神奇地显现出来。它们是数以千计并发且通常不相关的趋势的最终结果。最广泛地说，一个健康发展的技术部门需要一个巨大的市场来产生收入和推动发展，需要大量熟练的劳动力来进行大脑和实施工作，以及近乎无限的资金供应来推动研究、运营和大规模应用。
Technology is going to be a mess. Server farms, smartphones, and software don’t just magically manifest. They are the end results of thousands of concurrent and often unrelated trends. Most broadly, a healthy and growing technology sector requires a massive market to generate revenues and fuel development, gobs of skilled labor to do the brain and implementation work, and a near-bottomless supply of financing to fuel research, operationalization, and mass application.
所有这三大类都面临蒸发。去全球化将缩小全球整体并将剩下的部分粉碎成隔离的市场。全球老龄化正在削弱熟练劳动力的供应。而财政紧缩将使一切变得更加昂贵和困难。
All three of these broad categories face evaporation. Deglobalization will shrink the global whole and shatter what remains into segregated markets. Global aging is collapsing the skilled labor supply. And financial shrinkage will make everything more expensive and more difficult.
也许最糟糕的情况是，随着资本和劳动力供应的减少，获得资金的项目将是那些最能减少就业的项目——尤其是当涉及到通常会外包给低劳动力的制造业时-成本地点。
Perhaps the worst aspect will be that as capital and labor supplies shrink, the projects that get funding will be those that can slim down their employment profile the most—particularly when it comes to the sort of manufacturing that would normally be outsourced to low-labor-cost locations.
我们将达到一个新的电子平衡，但它不会成为一个万能的技术乌托邦。以前根本无法涉足科技领域的国家，现在连尝试都做不到。其他踏入大门的人将失去双脚。这将不再是发达国家富裕而发展中国家贫穷的故事，而是少数发达国家富裕而其他国家一无所有的故事。
We are going to reach a new e-quilibrium, but it is not going to be a techtopia that raises all boats. Countries that have not yet been able to get involved with the technology sector at all now can’t even try. Others that had a foot in the door are going to lose their feet. It will be less a story of developed countries’ richness and the developing world’s poverty, and more a story of a handful of developed countries’ richness and everyone else’s nothing.
期望听到很多关于资本外逃和资本管制的信息。在或多或少统一的秩序世界中，资本可以不受限制地跨越国界来回流动。很少有国家有有意义的限制，因为人们普遍认识到，任何减缓资本流入或流出的措施都会使投资国饿死，而这会带来经济增长、就业、旅游、技术转让和机会方面的成本参与整个现代世界。从历史上看，出于同样的原因，这种开放与秩序世界中的其他一切一样不正常。“通常”世界有点像老鼠赛跑，资本是需要囤积的东西。
Expect to hear a lot about capital flight and capital controls. In the more or less unified world of the Order, capital can fly back and forth across borders with few limitations. Very few countries have meaningful restrictions, because of a general realization that any steps taken to slow the flow of capital in or out will starve the country of investment, and that has costs: in economic growth, employment, tourism, technological transfer, and opportunities to participate in the modern world in general. Historically, such openness is as abnormal as everything else in the world of the Order, and for the same reasons. “Normally” the world is a bit of a rat race, and capital is something to be hoarded.
这种资金短缺的糟糕日子又回来了。再加上十几个巨大的不安全和不稳定因素，你可以预期世界上大部分地区的人们会尝试将他们的钱——在许多情况下，他们自己——转移到更绿色、更安全的地方。
The bad ol’ days of such capital shortages are coming back. Add in a dozen or so fat dollops of insecurity and instability and you can expect people in much of the world to attempt to relocate their money—and in many cases, themselves—to greener and safer pastures.
资本外逃已经是晚期秩序的一个特征。美国因对私人资本不干涉而享有盛誉，这使其成为无可否认的全球金融中心。中国的超级金融化模式（在较小程度上，整个东亚的类似金融体系）已经不定期地将大量现金涌入美国。2000 年以来的欧洲动荡提供了更多信息。这方面的数据很难获得，甚至更难审查，但一个很好的猜测是，自 2000 年以来，每年大约有 1 万亿至 2.5 万亿美元的外国资金流入美国。随着美国的增长和稳定与全球萧条和不稳定之间的差距越来越大，预计这个数字会膨胀。很多。_
Capital flight is already a feature of the late Order. The United States’ mostly well-earned reputation for having a hands-off approach to private capital has made it the undeniable global financial hub. The Chinese hyperfinancialization model (and to a lesser degree, similar financial systems throughout East Asia) has sent irregular bursts of cash into the United States. European wobbles since 2000 provided even more. Data on this is extraordinarily hard to come by and even more difficult to vet, but a good guesstimate is that since 2000 somewhere between $1 trillion and $2.5 trillion of foreign money has flowed into the United States each and every year. As the gap between American growth and stability and global depression and instability widens, expect that figure to inflate. A lot.
这对美国人来说是件好事，并有望缓解不断上升的资本成本带来的压力，但对于资金来源国来说，这是一场潜在的灾难。迅速退休的人口增加了对国家支出的需求，而工作年龄人口的减少同时削弱了政府筹集资金的能力。任何想把钱运出去的人都会被视为近乎叛徒。限制这种外逃——也就是资本管制——是解决之道。
That’s great for the Americans, and promises to take a bit of the heat out of rising capital costs, but it is a potential disaster for the countries the money will be coming from. Rapidly retiring populations increase demands for state spending, while shrinking working-age populations simultaneously gut government capacity to raise funds. Anyone looking to ship their money out will be viewed as borderline traitorous. Restrictions on such flight—aka capital controls—are the solution.
结果很快显现出来。当公司认为他们无法从国外获取利润时，他们首先就不太可能对该国的业务感兴趣。资本面临的最大风险将出现在人口老龄化速度最快和劳动力退休速度最快的地区：依次为俄罗斯、中国、韩国、日本和德国。
Outcomes manifest quickly. When firms don’t think they will be able to get their profits out of a foreign country, they are far less likely to have any interest in operations in that country in the first place. The biggest risks to capital will be in the places with the fastest-aging populations as well as those with the most rapidly retiring workforces: Russia, China, Korea, Japan, and Germany, in that order.
通货膨胀将无处不在。快速经济学课：
Inflation will be all over the place. A quick economics lesson:
通货膨胀发生在成本上升时，并且可能由任何形式的供需脱节引起：有人劫持集装箱船时供应链中断，需要更多住房和食物的年轻和/或饥饿人口，每个人都必须拥有的时尚一个卷心菜娃娃，或者当货币当局扩大货币供应以故意增加需求时。低于 2% 的通货膨胀水平通常被认为是可以的，但高于这个水平的任何东西都会变得越来越不愉快。
Inflation occurs when costs rise, and can be caused by any sort of disconnect in supply and demand: supply chain disruptions when someone hijacks a container ship, a young and/or hungry population that needs more housing and food, fads where everyone must have a Cabbage Patch doll, or when a monetary authority expands the money supply to deliberately increase demand. Inflation levels below 2 percent are generally considered okay, but anything above that becomes less and less enjoyable.
Dis通货膨胀是一种非常特殊的价格下跌。当你的智能手机或电脑获得更新，使你能够更好更快地做某事时，这就是通货紧缩。当新的油田或汽车厂或铜冶炼厂上线并增加供应时，情况也是如此。价格下降，但构成市场的关系并没有过度调整。大多数人都喜欢通货紧缩。我知道我肯定会。
Disinflation is a very specific sort of price drop. When your smartphone or computer gets an update that enables you to do something better and quicker, that’s disinflationary. It’s the same when a new oil field or car plant or copper smelter comes online and increases supply. Prices drop, but the relationships that make up the market are not unduly tweaked. Most folks love a bit of disinflation. I know I sure do.
然后是通货紧缩。价格下降，但这是因为出现了非常非常错误的情况。也许您的人口老龄化速度快于您的住房市场或工厂可以调整。需求暴跌导致一些基本的东西供过于求，比如电力、公寓或电子产品。如果不切断部分生产方，市场就无法进行调整，这会伤害工人，从而进一步减少需求。自 1990 年代经济崩溃以来，某种形式的通货紧缩一直困扰着日本，自 2007-09 年金融危机以来一直困扰着欧盟，而且它可能已经在中国流行起来，在中国不惜一切代价增加产量是状态咒语。
Then there is deflation. Prices drop, but it’s because something is very, very wrong. Perhaps your population has aged faster than your housing market or industrial plant can adjust. Cratering demand generates an oversupply in something basic, like electricity or condos or electronics. Markets cannot adjust without amputating part of the production side, which hurts workers, which reduces demand even more. Some version of deflation has been plaguing Japan ever since its economic crash in the 1990s, and the European Union ever since the 2007–09 financial crisis, and it is probably already endemic in China, where increasing-production-at-all-costs is the state mantra.
所以，有了这些，让我们谈谈未来。
So, with that under your belt, let’s talk about the future.
货币扩张处于通货紧缩状态。普遍存在的资本短缺导致通货膨胀直接进入金融领域。人口老龄化导致的消费下降会导致通货紧缩，而供应链断裂则会导致通货紧缩。建立新的工业厂房以取代国际供应链在进行过程中会导致通货膨胀，而一旦工作完成就会导致通货膨胀。新的数字技术往往会抑制通货膨胀，除非需要国际供应链来维持它们的运行，在这种情况下它们会导致通货膨胀。货币崩溃在由于每个人都从现金转移到他们可以囤积的商品，因此在遭受它们的国家会出现通货膨胀，但在逃离资本寻求救助的国家，这种崩溃会抑制通货膨胀。商品短缺几乎总是通货膨胀，但如果短缺是由供应链断裂引起的，那么它们可能会在商品来源附近出现通货紧缩，这意味着价格下降，导致产量下降，从而导致价格上涨，从而再次处于通胀状态。*
Monetary expansion is inflationary. Endemic capital shortages inject inflation directly into finance. The falling consumption of an aging population is deflationary, while breaking supply chains are inflationary. Building new industrial plant to replace international supply chains is inflationary while the process is under way, and disinflationary once the work is completed. New digital technologies tend to be disinflationary, unless international supply chains are needed to keep them running, in which case they are inflationary. Currency collapses are inflationary in the countries that suffer them as everyone shifts from cash to goods they can hoard, but such collapses are disinflationary in the countries where fleeing capital seeks succor. Commodity shortages are pretty much always inflationary, but if the shortage is caused by a supply chain break, then they can be deflationary near the commodity’s source, which means lower prices, which leads to lower production, which leads to higher prices, which are once again inflationary.*
我的底线是完全逃避：. 的未来。. . -通货膨胀*在每个地区、每个国家、每个部门、每种产品中都会有所不同，并且会根据几乎无法影响的各种因素发生巨大变化，更不用说预测了。我不想成为一名债券交易员。
My bottom line here is a total cop-out: the future of the . . . -flations* will be different in every region, every country, every sector, every product, and will change wildly, based on a wide variety of factors that can barely be influenced, much less predicted. I would hate to be a bond trader.
期待更多的民粹主义。全球人口正在迅速老龄化，而大多数老年人都相当。. . 以他们的方式设置。但不仅如此，退休人员依赖于他们的养老金。大多数养老金计划的资金来源要么来自税收，要么来自大规模持有债券所提供的股息。与债券相关的收入往往较低且稳定。这意味着退休人员需要稳定的价格。与债券相关的收入流往往会在长期衰退中崩溃。对于许多（大多数？）国家来说，持续十年或两年的萧条在这一点上已经基本成熟。在去全球化、人口崩溃和冠状病毒之间，大多数国家将永远无法恢复到 2019 年的水平。大多数养老金将在通货膨胀水平不断上升和变化的世界中分崩离析。
Expect a lot more populism. The global demographic is aging rapidly, and most older folks are rather . . . set in their ways. But more than that, retirees are dependent upon their pensions. Most pension schemes are funded either by tax revenues or by dividends provided by large-scale bond holdings. Bond-related income tends to be low and stable. That means retirees need stable prices. Bond-related income streams tend to break down in prolonged recessions. For many (most?) countries, a depression lasting a decade or two is pretty much baked in at this point. Between deglobalization, demographic collapse, and the coronavirus, most countries will never recover to where they were in 2019. Most pensions are going to fly apart in a world of rising and variable inflation levels.
作为一个投票集团，退休人员与其说是害怕变化，不如说是无休止地抱怨它，导致文化既反动又脆弱。一个结果是政府越来越迎合民粹主义的要求，在经济上将自己与其他国家隔离开来，并在军事问题上采取更激进的立场。您以前是否对父母和祖父母的投票方式感到畏缩？想象一下，如果他们的养老金收入下降，他们会支持什么样的懒人。
As a voting bloc, retirees don’t so much fear change as endlessly bitch about it, resulting in cultures both reactionary and brittle. One outcome is governments that increasingly cater to populist demands, walling themselves off from others economically and taking more aggressive stances on military matters. Did you wince at your parents’ and grandparents’ voting patterns before? Just imagine the sorts of loons they’ll support should their pension income fail.
美国会有例外。世界上最好的地理环境将使开发成本保持在较低水平。富裕世界最好的人口结构将使美国的资本成本增加不那么繁重。美国千禧一代的崛起表明，到 2040 年代——当千禧一代最终进入资本充裕的年龄段时——资本供应将再次上升，从而降低资本成本。美国货币政策的相对保守性加上美元作为唯一储备货币的地位，使美国人在弥补资本损失方面有更大的回旋余地，并保证了美国人在动荡世界中最大比例的资本外逃。
There will be American exceptions. The world’s best geography will keep development costs low. The rich world’s best demography will make America’s capital cost increases less onerous. The rise of the American Millennials suggests that by the 2040s—when the Millennials finally age into that capital-rich age bracket—capital supply will once again rise, taking the heat out of capital costs. The relative conservatism of American monetary policy combined with the U.S. dollar’s status as the sole reserve currency grants the Americans more wiggle room in compensating for capital loss and guarantees the Americans the largest proportion of capital flight from a troubled world.
而且，奇怪的是，美国持续存在的不平等问题实际上可能会提供一些帮助。
And, oddity of oddities, America’s ongoing inequality issues might actually provide some help.
还记得人们的收入是如何随着工作经验的增加而增加的，以及用于投资的收入比例是如何增加的吗？这种情况发生在富人身上，就像发生在“普通”人身上一样。这两个群体的分歧在于退休。“普通”退休人员不得不将其持有的资产转移到低风险投资中，因为他们无法忍受波动，但富人积蓄如此之多，以至于他们做了两件事。
Remember how people’s income increases with work experience, and how the proportion of income that is invested similarly increases? That happens with the rich just as it does with “normal” people. Where the two groups diverge is at retirement. “Normal” retirees have to shift their holdings into low-risk investments because they cannot tolerate volatility, but rich folks have so much stored up that they do two things differently.
首先，超级富豪只需保留一小部分财产即可维持他们的生活方式。他们可以承受更高的风险水平，因此将大部分投资组合（通常超过一半）完全投入股票和债券市场。其次，富人更有可能意识到他们无法随身携带，而且没有理由带着 1 亿美元死在银行里。他们倾向于在去世前很久就开始将资产转移给下一代或慈善机构。
First, the ultra-rich only need to preserve a fraction of their holdings to maintain their lifestyle. They can tolerate a much higher risk level and so keep much of their investment portfolio—typically well over half—fully engaged in stock and bond markets. Second, the rich are far more likely to realize they can’t take it with them, and there’s no reason to die with $100 million in the bank. They tend to start transferring assets to the next generation or charities long before they pass on.
在大多数国家，这些差异并没有太大影响，但在美国，最富有的 1% 的人控制着超过一半的金融资产。如果美国股票和债券市场上 1% 的资本中只有一半没有变现并保持活跃（或转移给年轻人，他们将按照更正常的模式配置资本），那么普遍转向资本受限的环境不会那么刺耳。但这只适用于拥有庞大资本市场和极度不平等的发达国家。那是一个列表。大量的流动资金并不能解决所有问题，但在资金受限的世界里呢？坚实的开始。
In most countries these differences do not move the needle very much, but in the United States the top 1 percent controls upwards of half of all financial assets. If just half of the 1 percent’s capital in the American stock and bond markets is not liquidated and remains engaged (or is transferred to younger people, who will deploy the capital following more normal patterns), then the general shift to a capital-constrained environment won’t be quite so jarring. But this only holds true in advanced countries with large capital markets and screaming inequality. That is a list of exactly one. A large volume of mobile capital cannot fix everything, but in a world of constrained capital? Solid start.
如果这一切听起来都不是特别资本主义，那是因为它不是。允许资本主义存在的环境是我们都已经习惯的“更多”的一部分，如果没有持续的经济增长，资本主义是否能够存在是非常值得怀疑的。
If none of this sounds particularly capitalistic, that’s because it is not. The environment that allowed capitalism to exist is part of the “more” we’ve all become used to, and it is highly questionable whether capitalism can exist without ongoing economic growth.
我的意思不是说资本主义已经死了，而是即使美国人，世界上最年轻和最富有的先进人口——拥有最多“更多”的人——也已经开始从资本主义转变，全球化系统到 . . . 无论接下来发生什么。
My point isn’t that capitalism is dead, but instead that even the Americans, the youngest and richest advanced population in the world—the people with the most “more” of all—are already eyeball-deep into the transition from a capitalist, globalized system to . . . whatever comes next.
最重要的是，如果我们所知道的，或者至少我们认为我们所知道的，已经在此时此地在美国逐渐消失，那么世界其他地方对弄清楚未来还有什么希望呢？
On top of that, if what we know, or at least what we think we know, is already fading away in America in the here and now, then what hope does the rest of the world have for figuring out the future?
既然大家都打起精神来了，我们就来说说熄灯的时候会发生什么。
Now that everyone is cheered up, let’s talk about what happens when the lights go out.
鱼叉式进步
Harpooning Progress
请允许我讲一个疯狂的小故事。
Allow me to tell a crazy little story.
在前苏联的哈萨克斯坦共和国，有一个名为卡沙干的石油矿床。它位于里海海底两英里处，该区域经常遭受每小时 60 英里的风速袭击。在冬天，不仅海冰在移动，而且海风还携带着海浪，海浪常常将整个海上生产设施本身埋在几英尺厚的冰层中。Kashagan 拥有世界上最糟糕的运营条件，无一例外。
In the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, there is an oil deposit called Kashagan. It’s located two miles under the floor of the Caspian Sea, in a zone regularly pummeled by sixty-mile-per-hour winds. In winter not only is there moving sea ice, but the winds carry sea spray, which often entombs the entire offshore production facility itself in feet of ice. Kashagan has, bar none, the world’s worst operating conditions.
Kashagan 与典型的油田不同，它是一个垂直沉积物，从顶部到底部超过两英里。它的压力水平千差万别，导致频繁且令人印象深刻的可怕井喷。它的石油含硫量如此之高，以至于原油一旦登陆就必须进行加工，产生数英里宽的硫层。Kashagan 拥有世界上最困难的技术环境，无一例外。
Atypical for oil fields, Kashagan is a vertical deposit, over two miles from top to bottom. It sports wildly variant pressure levels, leading to frequent—and impressively terrifying—blowouts. Its oil is so high in sulfur that the crude must be processed once it makes landfall, generating miles-wide sulfur beds. Kashagan boasts, bar none, the world’s most difficult technical environment.
开发 Kashagan 需要业内最优秀的人才从根本上开发新技术来应对该领域的独特挑战。开发它的公司财团花费了超过 1500亿美元——远远超过了哈萨克斯坦当时的全年 GDP——甚至在首次商业生产之前14年。Kashagan 的启动成本是世界上最高的。能源界流传的一个笑话是，“Kashagan”的发音确实是“cash-all-gone”。
Tapping Kashagan required that the best minds in the industry develop fundamentally new technologies to deal with the field’s unique challenges. The consortium of companies developing it spent over $150 billion—considerably more than the entire annual GDP of Kazakhstan at the time—and fourteen years before even getting to first commercial production. Start-up costs at Kashagan are—bar none—the world’s highest. The running joke in energy circles is that “Kashagan” is really pronounced “cash-all-gone.”
Kashagan 的原油经过泵送、减压和加工后，通过管道输送到 1000 多英里外的黑海，在那里被装载到小型油轮上，通过土耳其海峡运往地中海，途经伊斯坦布尔市中心，然后继续航行通过苏伊士运河到达红海。然后将其重新装载到长途超级油轮上，将原油再运输八千英里，经过巴基斯坦和印度，穿过马六甲海峡，并全部运完在到达日本的最终目的地之前，经过越南和中国海岸。
Once Kashagan’s crude is pumped up, depressurized, and processed, it is piped more than one thousand miles to the Black Sea, where it is loaded onto small tankers for transit through the Turkish Straits to the Mediterranean, passing through downtown Istanbul, before sailing on through the Suez Canal to the Red Sea. It its then reloaded onto long-haul supertankers that transport the crude another eight thousand miles past Pakistan and India, through the Strait of Malacca, and by the entirety of the Vietnamese and Chinese coasts before reaching its final destination in Japan.
这是一条冒险的路线。哈萨克斯坦是俄罗斯的前省份，两者并不相处。土耳其与俄罗斯打了十一场（更多？） 场大战，但他们相处不好。埃及是土耳其的前省份，他们相处不好。沙特阿拉伯认为哈萨克斯坦是一个经济竞争对手，他们相处不好。这条路线途经不和的巴基斯坦和印度，以及不和的越南和中国，以及不和的中国和日本。哦，红海和马六甲也有海盗。卡沙甘的出口路线无一例外地是世界上最危险的。
It’s a dicey route. Kazakhstan is a former province of Russia and the two do not get along. Turkey has fought eleven (more?) major wars with Russia and they do not get along. Egypt is a former province of Turkey and they do not get along. Saudi Arabia considers Kazakhstan an economic competitor and they do not get along. The route passes by Pakistan and India, who do not get along, and Vietnam and China, who do not get along, and China and Japan, who do not get along. Oh, and there are pirates in the Red Sea and Malacca as well. Kashagan’s export route is—bar none—the world’s riskiest.
（有一些不确定的计划是通过一系列拼接在一起的苏联管道将卡沙干石油向东运到中国最西部，然后再穿越两千英里到达中国沿海的人口中心。考虑到这条路线使人员和基础设施暴露在从每年冬天零下 40 度到每年夏天零上 105 度的温度波动中，目前尚不清楚这是否会在后勤方面有所改善。）
(There are iffy plans to ship Kashagan oil east through a series of patched-together and patched-up Soviet pipes to extreme western China, before it is sent on across the two-thousandish-mile trip to the population centers on the Chinese coast. Considering that that route exposes people and infrastructure to temperature swings from 40 degrees below zero every winter to 105 degrees above zero every summer, it is unclear if this would be a logistical improvement.)
每当我考虑 Kashagan 的历史、机制和出口路线时，我所能想到的就是，什么。这。地狱？？？
Whenever I consider the history and mechanics and export routes of Kashagan, all I can think is, What. The. Hell???
Kashagan 及其出口路线令人困惑，科学怪人般的奇迹只能在教团的支持下发生。长久以来，秩序使一切变得如此和平、稳定和富裕，以至于生产和运输系统在任何其他时代都被认为比愚蠢的要高出几步之遥。
The bewildering, Frankensteinian wonder that is Kashagan and its export route could only occur under the aegis of the Order. The Order has made everything so peaceable and stable and wealthy for so long that production and transport systems that would have been considered several steps beyond asinine in any other age are well within reach.
它。将要。不是。最后的。
It. Will. Not. Last.
卡沙干五十万桶的日产量，对于这个世界来说显然并不长。但它并不是未来几年面临完全崩溃的唯一生产区。那将是毁灭性的。一般的现代能源和具体的石油是将我们的当代世界与前工业化世界区分开来的东西。它将我们定义为“文明”的东西与之前的东西区分开来。
Kashagan’s half a million barrels of daily output is obviously not long for this world. But it is hardly the only production zone that faces complete collapse in the years to come. That will be crushing. Modern energy in general and oil in specific is what separates our contemporary world from the preindustrial. It separates what we define as “civilization” from what came before.
考虑到在长达 6 千年的历史记录中阻碍人类发展的交通难题，石油是一个很好的选择神奇的物质。石油衍生的液体运输燃料使我们远距离移动物体的能力提高了一千倍。石油直接或间接提供的按需电力对我们的生产力产生了类似的影响。历史上第一次，我们可以随时随地做任何事情。更好的是，“我们”第一次不是指那个时代最强大的帝国，而是指每一个人。一旦你的家有线，每个人都可以以低成本用上电。与木材或煤炭不同，石油基液体燃料（例如汽油和柴油）能量密集且易于储存，因此我们将它们储存在我们的交通工具中。
Considering the transport conundrums that have held humanity back throughout the six-millennia-long stretch of recorded history, oil is a pretty magical substance. Oil-derived liquid transport fuels increased our capacity to move objects at distance by a factor of one thousand. On-demand electricity, directly or indirectly made possible by oil, had a similar impact upon our productivity. For the first time in history, we could do anything and go anywhere at anytime. Even better, for the first time “we” didn’t mean the most powerful empire of the era, but instead every individual person. Once your home is wired, everyone can have electricity at low cost. Unlike wood or coal, oil-based liquid fuels such as gasoline and diesel are so energy-dense and so easily stored that we store them within our modes of transport.
没有石油，美国领导的全球秩序将永远没有机会。也不会有乘用车。或全球食品分配。或全球制造。或现代医疗保健。或者我们大多数人都穿的鞋子。石油的力量如此之大，以至于在许多方面，它几乎使我们能够忽略地理本身。
Without oil, the American-led global Order would have never had a chance. Nor would have passenger cars. Or global food distribution. Or global manufacturing. Or modern health care. Or the shoes most of us are wearing. Oil’s power is such that in many ways, it has almost enabled us to ignore nothing less than geography itself.
差不多。石油并不是那么完美。限制油坚持的不是技术，而是采购。石油没有义务存在于方便的地方。在整个工业时代，一直将石油从它存在的地方运到需要它的地方。. . 粗糙的。在这一点上，卡沙甘并不突出。
Almost. Oil is not quite that perfect. The restriction oil insists upon is not technological, but instead one of sourcing. Oil feels no obligation to exist in locations that are convenient. For the entirety of the Industrial Age, getting the oil from where it exists to where it is needed has been . . . gnarly. In that, Kashagan is no standout.
最好从头开始。与亚哈船长。
It is best to start at the beginning. With Captain Ahab.
通往现代能源之路：战争、崇拜、鲸鱼和 . . . 针织？
THE PATH TO MODERN ENERGY: WARS, WORSHIP, WHALES, AND . . . KNITTING?
改善人类状况的方法只有这么多。一种是征服一大片土地并将其据为己有。另一种方法是让社会中尽可能多的人参与系统，以便他们的集体行动支持政府和经济的各个方面。第三个想法是赶回黑夜，并以此制造最稀有的商品：时间。
There are only so many ways to advance the human condition. One is to conquer a big chunk of land and make it your own. Another is to give as many people as you can within your society a stake in the system, so their collective actions support all aspects of the government and economy. A third idea is to drive back the night, and in doing so manufacture that rarest of commodities: time.
到 1700 年代后期，英国人开始更加积极地、规模越来越大地使用纺织品。较新的织机和纺锤以及纺纱珍妮有几个共同的特点。它们是那个时代最新、最昂贵的技术。重要的是要保护这些资产免受各种因素的影响，并且对它们进行加工需要非常敏锐的眼光，既要保证输出质量，又要避免失去手指。如果你曾经去过英国，你就会认识到这个问题。英国的天气经常潮湿阴暗。伦敦距离北部足够远，以至于 12 月平均每天的光照时间不足八小时。. . 假设没有下雨。*这让棉纺厂的内部一片漆黑。传统的火炬会污染纱线和布料，蜡烛不能产生足够的光，我这个长途背包客可以向你保证，原棉是极好的引火物。
By the late 1700s the British were playing around with textiles ever more aggressively and at an ever-larger scale. The newer looms and spindles and spinning jennies had a couple of common characteristics. They were the newest and most expensive technologies of the age. It was important to protect such assets from the elements, and working them required a very keen eye both for quality output and to avoid losing fingers. If you’ve ever been to England, you’ll recognize the problem. English weather is often wet and dark. London is far enough north that December averages less than eight hours of light a day . . . assuming it isn’t raining.* That made the interior of the cotton mills dark. Traditional torches would have contaminated the yarn and cloth, candles don’t generate enough light, and the long-distance backpacker in me can assure you that raw cotton is an excellent fire starter.
解决方案是鲸油。鲸油清洁、明亮、燃烧时间长，并且很容易装在合适的灯中，它通过减少伤害来保护员工，同时增加设施可以运行的轮班次数。这些东西很快成为从教堂服务到鸡尾酒会再到中产阶级公寓的一切事物的首选。随着早期的工业革命为欧洲提供了剩余的食物，人类正在迅速扩张以填满所有可用空间，需要更多的石油来点亮更多的教堂服务、更多的鸡尾酒会和更多的中产阶级公寓。
The solution was whale oil. Clean, bright, long burning, and easily contained within an appropriate lamp, whale oil protected the staff by limiting injuries while simultaneously boosting how many shifts a facility could run. The stuff quickly became the go-to for everything from church services to cocktail parties to middle-class apartments. And with the early Industrial Revolution providing Europe with food surpluses, humanity was quickly expanding to fill all available space, demanding more oil to light more church services and more cocktail parties and more middle-class apartments.
鲸油也不仅仅用于照明。早期的工业时代生产了很多机器，其中有很多零件很容易卡住（包括前面提到的纺织设备）。为了防止对人和机器造成损害，润滑是解决方案。鲸鱼成了灵丹妙药：清淡、润滑，还有一些牛排。每个人都赢了。
Nor was whale oil only used for light. The early Industrial Age produced lots of machinery with lots of parts that could get stuck very easily (including the aforementioned textile equipment). To prevent damage to both man and machine, lubrication was the solution. The whale became a panacea: light, lubrication, and some steaks on the side. Everybody won.
除了鲸鱼。
Except the whales.
在亚哈船长和像他这样的人的帮助下，曾经数百万的生物在短时间内减少到数万。鲸鱼减少意味着鲸油减少，鲸油价格上涨。
Courtesy of Captain Ahab and men like him, creatures that once existed in the literal millions were reduced in short order to the tens of thousands. Fewer whales meant less whale oil, and the price of whale oil rose.
解决方案有两种形式：
The solution took two forms:
第一，煤炭。煤矿中常见的危险之一是甲烷，这是一种气态物质，我们也将其称为天然气、牛屁和煤气。管理煤气对煤矿工人来说是一个持续的挑战，因为每次矿工打开煤层时，都有可能释放出一些隐藏的东西。常见的结果是窒息和爆炸。
First, coal. One of the common dangers in coal mines is methane, a gaseous substance that we know alternatively as natural gas, cow farts, and coal gas. Managing coal gas is a constant challenge for coal miners, since every time a miner cracks into a seam, there’s a chance of releasing some hidden pocket of the stuff. Common outcomes are asphyxiation and explosion.
然而，在存在不受控制地爆炸风险的地方，也有可能使其可控地燃烧。加上一些工业时代的化学知识，我们想出了如何加工煤炭以按需产生甲烷。然后我们将其通过管道输送到路灯（或纺织厂）中以供照明。我们在英格兰南部、美国东北部和德国看到了相当多的这类事情。
Yet where there’s a risk of something exploding uncontrollably, there is also a possibility of making it burn controllably. Add in a bit of Industrial Age chemistry know-how and we figured out how to process coal to generate methane on demand. We’d then pipe it into streetlamps (or textile factories) for light. We saw a fair amount of this sort of thing in southern England, the American Northeast, and Germany.
第二种也是更广泛使用的解决方案是一种叫做煤油的东西。与煤气不同，爆炸的危险是不存在的，你不必靠近煤炭供应，也不需要安装任何基础设施。你只需要一盏灯。
The second and more widespread solution was something called kerosene. Unlike coal gas, dangers of explosion were nonexistent, and you didn’t have to be proximate to a coal supply and you didn’t need to install any infrastructure. You just needed a lamp.
早期的煤油来自煤炭，但蒸馏过程比乘坐风力船航行半个地球与巨大的鲸类动物战斗，然后爬进它们的尸体，切开它们的内脏，然后将它们煮沸要昂贵得多，也危险得多。比特在同一条船上航行回来，同时伴随着一群极度饥渴的前科犯。1850 年代初期，美国和波兰几乎同时取得的技术突破证明，从当时被称为“岩油”的物质中获取煤油要便宜得多、速度快、安全得多。今天我们称它为“原油”或简称为“石油”。
Early kerosene was sourced from coal, but the distillation process was far more expensive and dangerous than getting on a wind-powered vessel and sailing halfway around the world do battle with colossal cetaceans before climbing into their corpses to hack away their insides and then boiling the bits on the same vessel and voyaging back, all while accompanied by a bunch of violently horny ex-cons. Near-simultaneous technological breakthroughs in America and Poland in the early 1850s proved it was far cheaper, faster, and safer to source kerosene from something that at the time was known as “rock oil.” Today we call it “crude oil” or simply “oil.”
然后我们转向采购。人类自古以来就知道原油“渗漏”。拜占庭人利用这些石油资源为他们的敌人制造了一种被称为“希腊之火”的派对恩惠，而琐罗亚斯德教徒则更喜欢点燃渗漏物以确保派对永无止境。问题是音量。这种渗漏每天很少产生超过几夸脱的东西。人类需要多一百万倍。十亿倍。
We then turned to sourcing. Humanity had known about crude oil “seeps” since ancient times. The Byzantines used such oil sources to make a party favor known as “Greek fire” for their enemies, while the Zoroastrians preferred to light the seeps on fire to ensure the party never ended. The problem was volume. Such seeps rarely generated more than a few quarts of the stuff a day. Humanity needed a million times more. A billion times more.
解决方案从美国冒出来。1858 年，埃德温·德雷克将一些铁路发动机零件应用于宾夕法尼亚州泰特斯维尔郊外的立式钻机。几周之内，世界上第一口油井在几个小时内生产的原油比大多数渗漏油一年的产量还多。在短短几年内，煤油被证明是如此便宜和容易，以至于鲸油几乎从照明和润滑剂市场上消失了。
The solution bubbled up out of America. In 1858 one Edwin Drake applied some railway engine parts to a vertical drill outside of Titusville, Pennsylvania. Within a few weeks the world’s first-ever oil well was producing more crude oil in a couple of hours than most seeps would in a year. Within a few short years, kerosene proved so cheap and easy that whale oil all but vanished from the lighting and lubrication markets.
然后真正的奇迹来了。我们开始将我们最近从修补煤炭中获得的材料科学专业知识应用到这个新的石油世界。没过多久，鲸油替代煤油就为我们指明了风能替代燃料油和马替代汽油的道路。*石油不再仅仅是一种推后黑夜和加速齿轮所需的产品。正是这些材料让我们能够做到。. . 一切。这意味着我们不仅需要更多，还需要更多！
Then the real miracle arrived. We started applying material science expertise we had only recently gained from tinkering with coal to this new world of oil. It wasn’t long before whale-oil-replacement kerosene showed us the way to wind-power-replacement fuel oil and horse-replacement gasoline.* Oil was no longer merely a product needed to push back the night and slick up gears. It was the material that allowed us to do . . . everything. Which meant we didn’t simply need more, we needed more!
你在哪里寻找你需要的东西？好吧，当然是你最后一次看到它的地方。当时的帝国开始在全球范围内寻找那些在整个古代都拥有丰富多彩文化的著名渗漏物，以便他们可以从中钻出焦油。琐罗亚斯德教土地（当代阿塞拜疆）的北部渗透现在落入俄罗斯人手中。他们的南部渗出处位于波斯领土内，但这并没有阻止英国人取得控制权。荷兰人宣称对爪哇的渗漏拥有帝国权力。美国人不仅拥有宾夕法尼亚和阿巴拉契亚盆地，还有更广阔的俄亥俄河流域和得克萨斯。在包括二战在内的帝国竞争的混乱世界中，对这些生产基地的控制不仅仅是一个至关重要的问题，而且往往是战略实力与过时之间的差异。
Where do you look for something you need? Well, the last place you saw it, of course. The empires of the day began a hunt, global in scope, for those famous seeps that had colored cultures throughout antiquity, so that they could drill the tar out of them. The northern seeps of Zoroastrian lands (contemporary Azerbaijan) were now in Russian hands. Their southern seeps lay in Persian territory, but that didn’t stop the Brits from taking control. The Dutch asserted imperial power over the seeps of Java. The Americans had not only Pennsylvania and the Appalachian Basin, but also the wider Ohio River Valley and Texas. In the rough-and-tumble world of imperial competition up to and including World War II, control of such production sites was not simply an issue of critical importance, but often the difference between strategic strength and obsolescence.
石油时代最初几十年的共同点很简单：要么你有石油，就可以部署现代军事装备，并拥有它所赋予的疯狂速度、射程和打击力，要么你有。. . 在马背上。因此，石油生产基地是世界上戒备森严的地方之一。每个人都将石油存放在内部。
The commonality of these early decades of the oil era were simple: either you had oil and so could field modern military gear, complete with the insane speed and range and striking power it granted, or you were . . . on horseback. Thus oil production sites were among the world’s most jealously guarded locations. And everyone kept their oil in-house.
最后一点是关键。每个国家都有自己的主要石油公司——Compagnie法国是Française des Pétroles，英国是英波石油公司，美国是标准石油公司，等等。*他们的首要职责是为后方加油。为此，出口受到严格限制，国外产品被运回国内，每个国家都有自己的内部定价结构。这些隔离系统之间的价格经常相差超过三倍。美国人在国内生产他们需要的一切，因此不需要跨越全球的商船，他们几乎总是处于定价范围的低端。
This last point was key. Each country had its own major oil company—Compagnie Française des Pétroles for France, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company for the United Kingdom, Standard Oil Company for the United States, and so on.* Their first and primary responsibility was to fuel the home front. To that end, exports were sharply limited, foreign production was shipped home, and each country had its own internal pricing structure. Prices among these sequestered systems regularly varied by in excess of a factor of three. The Americans, who produced everything they needed at home and so didn’t need a globe-spanning merchant marine, were pretty much always on the low end of the pricing scale.
在石油相关技术的新颖性和石油供应的紧迫性之间，第二次世界大战以人类历史上前所未有的方式展示了资源中心性。帝国曾经因为胡椒的销售可以产生金钱而争夺胡椒。帝国为石油而战，因为没有石油他们就无法打仗。日本人于 1942 年成功占领爪哇以获取荷兰的石油资源，而美国在 1944 年底的无限制潜艇战让日本人缺乏燃料。1942-43 年冬天，德国人对苏维埃阿塞拜疆的琐罗亚斯德教旧资产的绝望竞购在斯大林格勒失败了，而美国人则在 1943 年 8 月轰炸了罗马尼亚的油田，以阻止纳粹的生产。
Between the newness of the oil-related technologies and the criticality of the oil supply, World War II showcased resource centrality in a way unprecedented in human history. Empires used to fight over pepper because of the money its sale could generate. Empires fought over oil because they couldn’t fight a war without it. The Japanese successfully captured Java in 1942 to acquire Dutch oil resources, while America’s unrestricted submarine warfare by the end of 1944 starved the Japanese of fuel. The Germans’ desperate bid for those old Zoroastrian assets in Soviet Azerbaijan foundered at Stalingrad in the winter of 1942–43, while the Americans bombed Romanian oil fields in August 1943 to deny the Nazis their output.
另一方面，美国的原油来自美国本土 48 个州，而不是悬在脆弱供应线末端的遥远土地。美国的战争机器不仅从未面临过大规模的燃料短缺，而且洋基队能够为他们的英国甚至苏联盟友提供燃料。如果没有宾夕法尼亚和得克萨斯，战争的结局将截然不同。
On the flip side, America’s crude oil came from the Lower 48, not some far-off land dangling at the end of a vulnerable supply line. Not only did the American war machine never face large-scale fuel shortages, but the Yanks were able to keep their British and even Soviet allies fueled up. Without Pennsylvania and Texas, the war would have ended very differently.
当然，美国人在战争结束时重塑世界的方式改变了一切。石油也不例外。
Of course, the way the Americans rewired the world at war’s end changed everything. Oil was no exception.
该订单的石油订单
The Order’s Order for Oil
当美国人杀死帝国时代时，他们也杀死了管理帝国时代石油分配系统的帝国经济结构。这样做的部分原因是为了坚决谴责旧的帝国制度成为历史。毕竟，如果英国人不再完全拥有波斯石油，那么伦敦的全球影响力就会减弱。
When the Americans killed the Imperial Age, they also killed the imperial economic structures that had managed the Imperial Age’s oil distribution system. In part this was done with an eye toward firmly condemning the old imperial system to history. After all, if the Brits no longer wholly owned Persian oil, then London would have less global heft.
但其中更大的一部分是推动美国大部分战略考量的同样的经济换安全交易。
But a bigger piece of it was the same economics-for-security trade that drove most of the American strategic calculus.
美国遏制苏联的计划需要盟友，必须以经济准入和增长的承诺购买这些盟友，需要为准入和增长提供燃料，而燃料只能从这么多地方采购。突然之间，没有英国石油、荷兰石油和法国石油，只有全球石油。. . 正如美国海军所保证的那样。任何原油现在都可以到达任何买家手中。所有不同的隔离定价模型都合并为一个单一的全球价格，仅根据距离和来自这个或那个油田的原油的特定化学特性进行修改。
The American plan to contain the Soviets required allies, those allies had to be purchased with the promise of economic access and growth, that access and growth needed to be fueled, and the fuel could only be sourced from so many locations. All of a sudden, instead of British oil and Dutch oil and French oil there was only global oil . . . as guaranteed by the U.S. Navy. Any crude could now reach any buyer. All the varied sequestered pricing models collapsed into a single global price, modified only by distance and the specific chemical peculiarities of crude from this or that field.
在新的战略环境中，石油立即陷入困境。
Oil immediately became tangled up in the new strategic environment.
波斯和荷属东印度群岛等知名能源生产国重获新生，成为我们现在所知的伊朗和印度尼西亚等独立国家。技术上独立但实际上一半由外国管理的新兴能源生产商（想想：伊拉克和沙特阿拉伯）被允许进入自己的领域。不出所料，一些欧洲国家抵制非殖民化，但美国人表现出一反常态的耐心，他们经常等到殖民地内的革命运动达到临界点，然后再向盟友施压，或者直到双边关系的潮起潮落提供了条件。一个开口。因此，像尼日利亚（1960 年）和阿拉伯联合酋长国（1971 年）这样多种多样的国家从英国、阿尔及利亚（1962 年）从法国和安哥拉（1975 年）从葡萄牙获得独立。最终结果如期而至：一个日益多样化的独立、重要的石油供应商名单，为全球化——尤其是美国管理的——体系服务。
Known energy producers such as Persia and the Dutch East Indies gained a new lease on life, becoming the independent countries we now know as Iran and Indonesia. Budding energy producers that were technically independent but in reality were half foreign-managed (think: Iraq and Saudi Arabia) were allowed to come into their own. Somewhat unsurprisingly, some European countries resisted decolonialization, but the Americans proved uncharacteristically patient and would often wait until revolutionary movements within the colonies reached critical mass before pressuring their allies, or until the ebb and flow of bilateral relations provided an opening. Thus countries as diverse as Nigeria (1960) and the United Arab Emirates (1971) received independence from the United Kingdom, Algeria (1962) from France, and Angola from Portugal (1975). The end result was as intended: an increasingly diverse list of independent, significant oil suppliers to a globalized—and above all, American-managed—system.
但是，尽管布雷顿森林体系的逻辑要求美国人建立、维护和扩大全球石油市场，但正是布雷顿森林体系的成果让这个过程变得疲惫不堪。布雷顿森林体系的核心戏弄——使其在吸引和留住盟友方面如此成功的原因——是通过进入美国市场和全球体系实现安全、稳定、可靠的经济增长的理念。随着这些盟国经济的增长，他们使用越来越远的地方的原油。随着美国拉拢越来越多的国家加入联盟，美国人从越来越远的地方也使用了越来越多的原油。到 20 世纪 70 年代初，国内的经济增长已经达到美国自身能源需求超过其生产能力的地步。美国人不仅不能再为他们的盟友加油，他们甚至不能为自己加油。在许多方面，同样的问题最终摧毁了黄金标准：成功导致使用导致更多成功导致更多使用导致失败。1973 年和 1979 年的阿拉伯石油禁运将此前在美国的假设性讨论变成了问题。
But as much as the logic of the Bretton Woods Order demanded that the Americans build, safeguard, and expand a global oil market, it was the outcomes of Bretton Woods that made the process exhausting. The core tease of the Bretton Woods system—what made it so successful in attracting and keeping allies—was the idea of secure, steady, reliable economic growth via access to the American market and global systems. As those allied economies grew, they used more and more crude from places farther and farther away. As the United States drew more and more countries into the alliance, the Americans used more and more crude from places farther and farther away, too. By the early 1970s, economic growth back at home had reached the point that America’s own energy demands outstripped its production capacity. Not only could the Americans no longer fuel their allies, but they couldn’t even fuel themselves. In many ways it was the same problem that ultimately gutted the gold standard: success begot use begot more success begot more use begot failure. The Arab Oil Embargos of 1973 and 1979 turned what had until then been a hypothetical discussion in America into brass tacks.
当威胁到石油获取的事件发生时，美国人的反应就好像末日即将来临，因为，嗯，就是这样。如果没有足够数量的负担得起的石油，整个秩序就会崩溃。美国（和英国！）的行动包括 1953 年在伊朗发起政变，推翻半民主制度，支持亲美的君主制。美国的行动包括支持 1965-66 年在印度尼西亚对共产主义分子进行边缘种族灭绝清洗。美国的行动包括 1968 年墨西哥独裁政府对亲民主力量的暗中支持。美国的行动包括二战以来美国最大规模的远征军事行动，作为 1992 年伊拉克军队从科威特强行驱逐的一部分。
When events transpired that threatened oil access, the Americans responded as if the end was nigh because, well, it was. Without sufficient volumes of affordable oil, the entire Order would collapse. American (and British!) actions included sponsoring a coup in Iran in 1953 to overthrow a semidemocratic system in favor of a pro-American monarchy. American actions included supporting of a borderline-genocidal purge in Indonesia of communist elements in 1965–66. American actions included the quiet backing of an authoritarian Mexican government against prodemocracy forces in 1968. American actions included the largest American expeditionary military action since World War II as part of the forcible ejection of Iraqi troops from Kuwait in 1992.
随着冷战的结束，布雷顿森林体系的相互联系得到了更广泛的应用，美国人有意识地、有条不紊地、不懈地扩大了石油供应的范围。俄罗斯后苏联经济崩溃对俄罗斯工业的打击远比对俄罗斯石油生产的打击严重，过剩的产出流向了全球市场。美国公司进入前苏联共和国——最著名的是哈萨克斯坦和阿塞拜疆——为世界带来越来越多的原油。一如既往，重点是供应的多样性和安全性，导致克林顿政府推动迂回的管道路线，以便在不利用俄罗斯领土的情况下尽可能多地将新流量引入全球市场。
With the end of the Cold War, the interconnections of the Bretton Woods system were applied even more broadly, with the Americans deliberately, methodically, unrelentingly expanding the scope of oil availability. The Russian post-Soviet economic collapse hit Russian industry far harder than Russian oil production, with the surplus output reaching global markets. American firms entered former Soviet republics—most notably Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan—to bring ever-larger volumes of crude to the world. As always, the focus was on diversity and security of supply, leading the Clinton administration to push for circuitous pipeline routes to bring as much of the new flows to the global market as possible without utilizing Russian territory.
从 1945 年开始的整个时期，这一过程为美国人带来了不小的不满，来自……。. . 几乎每个人。欧洲人痛恨失去他们的殖民地。新获得自由的殖民地不喜欢美国试图将它们聚集成一个集团来遏制一个国家，即苏联，这个国家之前很少有人与之接触过。阿拉伯世界并不欣赏美国人将他们的能源齿轮强加到布雷顿森林体系中（更不用说试图让他们与以色列人同床共枕了）。墨西哥人嫉妒华盛顿的强硬做法。（后苏联）俄罗斯人讨厌美国人如何明确地努力破坏他们在自己后院的影响力。伊朗人真的不喜欢这次政变。
Throughout the entire period of 1945 on, the process earned the Americans no small amount of umbrage, from . . . nearly everyone. The Europeans resented losing their colonies. The newly freed colonies disliked American efforts to corral them into a bloc to contain a country, the Soviet Union, that few had had any previous contact with. The Arab world didn’t appreciate the Americans forcing their energy cog into the Bretton Woods machine (much less attempting to make them bedfellows with the Israelis). The Mexicans begrudged Washington’s heavy-handed approach. The (post-Soviet) Russians hated how the Americans expressly worked to undermine their influence in their own backyard. The Iranians really didn’t appreciate the coup.
但规模一直在增加。在布雷顿森林体系时代初期，整个联盟（不包括美国）每天使用不到 1000 万桶 (mbpd)，其中大部分来自美国本身。到 1990 年，仅是联盟的先进成员就使用了两倍多，其中 90% 是进口的——而美国人自己又进口了 8 mbpd。随着冷战的结束和国际秩序的规则真正走向全球，一大批新的国家加入了这一行列——并在石油故事中加入了他们自己的要求。价格在 2008 年达到每桶 150 美元的历史高位，比十年前增长了 15 倍，即使全球需求超过 85 mbpd。
But the scale simply kept increasing. At the dawn of the Bretton Woods era, the entire alliance (sans the United States) used under 10 million barrels per day (mbpd), the majority of which was sourced from the United States itself. By 1990 just the advanced members of the coalition were using well over double that, 90 percent of which was imported—and with the Americans all by themselves importing another 8mbpd. With the Cold War’s end and the rules of the Order going truly global, an entire new raft of countries joined the party—and added their own demands to the oil story. Prices hit their historical high of $150 a barrel in 2008, a fifteenfold increase from just a decade earlier, even as global demand topped 85mbpd.
最初是为了补贴与美国原油建立军事联盟的努力，现在已经演变成一个臃肿、不可持续、最重要的是，美国人自己在经济上依赖的混乱局面。随着冷战的结束，美国人可能想在全球事务中扮演不那么积极的角色，他们可能想脱离接触，但单一的全球油价意味着这样做会面临不稳定、供应短缺和油价如此之高的风险以破坏美国经济。美国人在经济上陷入了自己过时的安全政策。
What had begun as an effort to subsidize a military alliance with American crude had devolved into a bloated, unsustainable, and above all expensive mess that the Americans themselves were now economically dependent upon. With the Cold War’s end, the Americans may have wanted to take a less active role in global affairs, they may have wanted to disengage, but a single global oil price meant that doing so would risk instability, supply shortages, and oil prices so high as to wreck the American economy. The Americans had become economically trapped in their own outdated security policy.
石油地图
The Map of Oil
当代版
Contemporary Edition
2022 年所有国际原油交易的大部分来自三个地区：
The bulk of all internationally traded crude oil in 2022 comes from three regions:
第一个是最重要、最明显和最有问题的：波斯湾。
The first is the most important, the most obvious, and the most problematic: the Persian Gulf.
与过去 50 年的各个主要地区不同，波斯湾地区一直无关紧要。的确，在大约 1500 年之前，该地区处于一切事物的中心，因此它被称为“中东”。存在的“全球”贸易取决于波斯湾周围的陆地和水域，作为连接欧洲和远东之间广阔领土的手段。但美国人并不是第一个发现该地区局势恶化的人。在很大程度上，深水技术的存在本身归功于欧洲试图避免整个中东。从 1500 年代初期葡萄牙人能够开辟进入印度的道路开始，经过或停留在该地区的需求或多或少消失了，从埃及到波斯的整个中东地区或多或少地滑入了战略要地无关紧要。
Unlike the various major regions of the past half millennia, the Persian Gulf region has aggressively not mattered. True, before roughly 1500 the region was in the middle of everything, ergo why it is called the “Middle” East. What “global” trade existed was dependent upon the lands and waters surrounding the Persian Gulf as a means of connecting the vast territories between Europe and the Far East. But the Americans were hardly the first people to find the region aggravating. In large part the very existence of the deepwater technologies owes itself to European attempts to avoid the Middle East altogether. From the time the Portuguese were able to shoot their way into India in the early 1500s, the need to pass through or stop in the region more or less evaporated, and the entirety of the Middle East from Egypt to Persia more or less slid into strategic irrelevance.
石油改变了一切。旧琐罗亚斯德教土地的货币化使波斯的重要性足以引起英国帝国的注意，波斯的地位在 1939-45 年成为战争不可或缺的一部分。真正的活动爆发发生在后来，在整个领土上发现和开采石油矿藏，现在不仅包括伊朗西南部，还包括伊拉克、科威特、沙特阿拉伯、巴林、卡塔尔、阿拉伯联合酋长国和阿曼。虽然多年来市场和军事的演变和操纵使这些参与者的个人输出发生了很大变化，但他们的集体输出一直是相当可靠的 20mbpd在过去的七个十年里。到 2021 年，这 2000 万桶大约是全球供应量的五分之一和国际贸易原油的二分之一。
Oil changed things. The monetization of the old Zoroastrian lands made Persia matter enough to trigger British imperial attention, with the status of Persia becoming integral to war efforts in 1939–45. The real explosion of activity happened later, with the discovery and exploitation of oil deposits throughout territory that now comprises not just southwestern Iran, but also Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman. While evolutions and manipulations both market and military have varied these players’ individual output widely over the years, their collective output has been a fairly reliable 20mbpd for the past seven decades. As of 2021 that 20 million barrels is roughly one-fifth of global supplies and one-half of internationally traded crude.
这八个国家有两个共同点。首先，他们在技术上无能，或者充其量是懒得犯罪。他们的教育制度是可悲的笑话，幸运地在外地获得技术学位的当地公民往往不会回来。当地人的无能不仅限于能源领域。这些国家理所当然地引进了数百万外国工人来处理从电力系统到建筑施工再到民用基础设施的一切事务。这八个国家都依赖外部工人——主要来自美国、英国、法国、俄罗斯、土耳其、阿尔及利亚和埃及——来维持原油流动。该地区不需要所有这些外国球员，但每个区域内国家至少需要其中一名。
These eight countries have two things in common. First, they are technologically incompetent or, at the very best, criminally lazy. Their educational systems are sad jokes, and local citizens lucky enough to gain technical degrees out-of-region tend not to return. The locals’ incompetence is hardly limited to the energy sector. These countries as a matter of course import millions of foreign workers to handle everything from their power systems to building construction to civic infrastructure. All eight countries rely on outside workers—primarily from the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, Turkey, Algeria, and Egypt—to keep the crude flowing. The region doesn’t need all of these foreign players, but each in-region country at least needs one of them.
其次，尽管这些国家在技术上无能，但在海军行动方面它们的能力更差。很少有人在国内建造过比快艇更有趣的东西，而且在几乎所有情况下，甚至都不是。特别是伊朗海军主要由充气 Zodiacs 组成。*没有人有能力巡逻自己的海岸线，更不用说他们的贸易途径，更不用说他们的收入——他们的存在所依赖的贸易通道-依靠。他们中的每一个都完全依赖外部力量将每一滴原油产品提供给最终消费者。对于这些出口的一半以上，这意味着到达日本、韩国、台湾和中国等东北亚国家。对于剩下的一半，这意味着到达欧洲或北美。没有这些国家的石油，骑士团可能不可能存在，但如果没有骑士团的战略监督，这些国家也不可能存在。
Second, as technically incompetent as these states are, they are even less competent when it comes to naval action. Few have ever domestically constructed anything more interesting than a speedboat, and in nearly all cases, not even that. Iran’s navy in particular is mostly composed of inflatable Zodiacs.* None have the capacity to patrol their own coastlines, much less their trade approaches, much less the trade lanes upon which their income—their existence—depends. Every single one of them is utterly dependent upon outside powers to get every drop of their crude production to end consumers. For more than half of those exports, that means reaching the Northeast Asian states of Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and China. For half of the remainder, it means reaching Europe or North America. The Order may not have been possible without these countries’ oil, but neither would these countries have been possible without the strategic overwatch of the Order.
第二个主要产油区是前苏联空间。
The second major zone of oil production is the former Soviet space.
尽管该地区的政治和地缘政治（如果有的话）比波斯湾更喧闹、更混乱、更沉重，但该地区石油的计算要简单得多。苏联是黑色物质的巨大生产国，但绝大部分产出都在苏联帝国内部消费。当苏联解体时，事情才开始在国际上变得有趣。苏联工业随之崩溃，而中欧的所有旧苏联卫星都解体了。随着俄罗斯内部需求的下降，以及其他前苏联帝国的需求现在在国际边界的另一边，俄罗斯人有大量的备用石油输出需要寻找新家。
While this region’s politics and geopolitics are, if anything, louder and messier and heftier than the Persian Gulf’s, the calculus of the region’s oil is far simpler. The Soviet Union was a massive producer of the black stuff, but the vast majority of that output was consumed within the Soviet empire. Things only started to get internationally interesting when the Soviet Union collapsed. Soviet industry collapsed along with it, while all the old Soviet satellites in Central Europe broke away. With Russian internal demand failing, and other former Soviet imperial demand now on the other side of international borders, the Russians had scads of spare oil output that needed to find new homes.
在苏联解体后的第一波出口浪潮中，俄罗斯人不仅关注他们所知道的，还关注他们的基础设施允许的东西：通过管道出口到他们以前的卫星，其中一个现在是重新统一的德国的组成部分。第二次浪潮扩展了俄罗斯人的知识，加厚并延伸了这些管道连接中欧进入西德、奥地利、西巴尔干和土耳其。
In the first wave of post-Soviet exports, the Russians focused not simply on what they knew, but on what their infrastructure would allow: piped exports to their former satellites, one of which was now a constituent part of a reunited Germany. The second wave expanded upon what the Russians knew, thickening and extending those pipe links through Central Europe into western Germany, Austria, the western Balkans, and Turkey.
在实施第二波浪潮时，俄罗斯人发现波兰的格但斯克、拉脱维亚的文茨皮尔斯和罗马尼亚的康斯坦察等港口可以作为俄罗斯原油的卸载设施，使其能够运往远方的客户。第三阶段是连接和建设俄罗斯自己的港口以达到相同的目的：波罗的海圣彼得堡附近的滨海边疆区以及黑海的新罗西斯克和图阿普谢。
In implementing wave two, the Russians discovered that ports like Gdansk in Poland, Ventspils in Latvia, and Constanta in Romania could serve as offloading facilities for Russian crude, enabling it to sail on to customers far and wide. Phase three was about linking up and building out Russia’s own ports to serve the same purpose: Primorsk near St. Petersburg on the Baltic Sea, and Novorossiysk and Tuapse on the Black Sea.
在前三个阶段，其他前苏联国家几乎没有停滞不前。现在与他们的前帝国主人离婚了，所有人都需要建立自己的收入来源——最好是那些不依赖于莫斯科的收入来源。阿塞拜疆和哈萨克斯坦都向所有外国投资者示好，其中 BP 和埃克森美孚最感兴趣。外国人执行了能源世界所见过的一些最复杂的地震、钻探、加工和基础设施项目，并开始通过任何可行的路线将原油运出。一些路线利用了苏联遗留的基础设施，向北和向西前往文斯皮尔斯或新罗西斯克等地。但随着时间的流逝，流量越来越集中到一个始于阿塞拜疆巴库的单一管道走廊，
During these first three phases, the other former Soviet states were hardly standing still. Now divorced from their former imperial master, all needed to establish their own income streams—preferably ones that were not beholden to Moscow. Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan both courted any and all foreign investors, with BP and Exxon proving the most interested. The foreigners executed some of the most complex seismic, drilling, processing, and infrastructure programs the energy world had ever seen and began shipping crude out via whatever route proved possible. Some routes tapped into legacy Soviet infrastructure, heading north and west to places like Venspils or Novorossiysk. But as time ticked by, the flows were increasingly concentrated into a single pipe corridor that began at Baku, Azerbaijan, and ended at a supertanker port in the Mediterranean city of Ceyhan, Turkey.
所有这些选择的共同点是，它们都朝着欧亚大陆欧洲末端的大方向流动。由于欧洲正处于人口高峰期，因此几乎没有理由期望欧洲的石油需求会再次增加。当然，俄罗斯人正在满足越来越大的需求，但市场饱和正在降低他们的定价能力。俄罗斯人对此深恶痛绝。因此在第四阶段，俄罗斯人开始了将新建管道基础设施向东延伸至太平洋的漫长而昂贵的过程。与永久冻土、山脉和距离有关的问题比比皆是，但如果有什么可以为俄罗斯人说的话，那就是他们从不被规模吓倒. 截至 2021 年，有两条主要线路投入运营：一条非常长、非常昂贵、在经济上非常有问题的管道，从西西伯利亚延伸到俄罗斯港口日本海的纳霍德卡，还有一条短得多的支线，将原油直接输送到中国老炼油中心大庆。
What all these options have in common is that they all flow in the general direction of Eurasia’s European extremities. And since Europe was peaking demographically, there was little reason to expect European oil demand to increase ever again. Sure, the Russians were filling a larger and larger slice of that demand, but market saturation was decreasing their pricing power. The Russians hated that. So in the fourth phase, the Russians started the long, expensive process of routing fresh pipe infrastructure east to the Pacific. Problems relating to permafrost and mountains and distance abound, but if there is one thing that can be said for the Russians, they are never intimidated by size. As of 2021 there were two main lines in operation: a very long, very expensive, very economically questionable pipe that stretches from western Siberia to the Russian port of Nakhodka on the Sea of Japan, and a far shorter spur line that delivers crude direct to the old Chinese refining hub of Daqing.
把所有这些加起来，你谈论的是 15 mbpd 的前苏联石油，其中整整 11 mbpd 来自俄罗斯境内，其中略多于一半用于出口——很容易成为地球上国际贸易原油流量的第二大来源。
Add it all up and you’re talking about 15mbpd of former Soviet oil, fully 11mbpd of which originates within Russia’s border, of which slightly over half is exported—easily the second-largest source of internationally traded crude flows on the planet.
有问题。
There are problems.
俄罗斯的大部分油田都很老旧，而且离俄罗斯的客户非常远。北高加索地区的油田几乎已被开采殆尽，鞑靼斯坦和巴什科尔托斯坦的油田已经过了顶峰，甚至西西伯利亚西部的油田在十多年来也出现了收益递减的迹象。除了少数例外，俄罗斯的新发现都更深、更小、技术上更具挑战性，甚至离人口中心更远。俄罗斯的产量没有崩溃的危险，但维持产量将需要更多的基础设施、更高的前期成本以及持续的技术支持和关怀，以防止稳定的产量下降变得更糟。
Most of Russia’s oil fields are both old and extraordinarily remote from Russia’s customers. Fields in the North Caucasus are all but tapped out, those of Tatarstan and Bashkortostan are well past their peak, and even those in western Siberia have been showing signs of diminishing returns for more than a decade. With few exceptions, Russia’s newer discoveries are deeper, smaller, more technically challenging, and even farther from population centers. Russian output isn’t in danger of collapsing, but maintaining output will require more infrastructure, far higher up-front costs, and ongoing technical love and care to prevent steady output declines from becoming something far worse.
俄罗斯人在石油工作方面并不懈怠，但从 1940 年到 2000 年，它们已经停止流通。相关技术人员在那段时间取得了长足的进步。外国人——最著名的是超级巨头 BP 和服务公司 Halliburton 和 Schlumberger——占当代俄罗斯产出的一半（差不多）。任何将西方公司大规模剔除的行为都会对整个前苏联地区的石油生产造成灾难性影响。乌克兰战争正在对这一理论进行压力测试。
The Russians are no slouches when it comes to oil work, but they were out of circulation from 1940 through 2000. The techs involved came a long way in that time. Foreigners—most notably supermajor BP and services firms Halliburton and Schlumberger—are responsible for half(ish) of contemporary Russia’s output. Any broad-scale removal of Western firms from the mix would have catastrophic impacts upon oil production throughout the entire former Soviet space. The Ukraine War is stress-testing that theory.
就他们而言，阿塞拜疆和哈萨克斯坦的项目无疑是世界上技术要求最高的项目（想想：Kashagan！）。除了设计这些项目的世界超级巨头中的少数人之外，这个星球上没有人可以维护它们。
For their part, the Azerbaijani and Kazakh projects are far and away the world’s most technically exacting (think: Kashagan!). Aside from the handful of folks in the world’s supermajors who designed these projects, no one on the planet can maintain them.
然后是出口路线的问题。在到达客户或卸货港之前，所有更广泛地区的石油流首先通过管道输送——在某些情况下甚至可以输送数千英里。管道不能。. . 躲闪。任何阻碍管道一英寸的东西都会关闭整个管道。在命令中，这很好而且花花公子。订购后，没那么多。
Then there’s the issue of export routes. All of the broader region’s oil flows first travel by pipe—in some cases for literally thousands of miles—before they reach either a customer or a discharge port. Pipes can’t . . . dodge. Anything that impedes a single inch of a pipe shuts the whole thing down. In the Order, that’s fine and dandy. Post-Order, not so much.
大约一半的流量终止于德国等最终用户，而另一半则必须装上油轮航行。这就是事情变得更加冒险的地方。在太平洋，纳霍德卡港位于日本、中国和韩国势力范围的中间。任何涉及这三者中的任何一个和纳霍德卡的有意义的冲突要么被占领要么成为陨石坑。*向西，通过新罗西斯克的黑海港口出口和 Tuapse 完全依赖通过伊斯坦布尔市中心的帆船，因此与土耳其人的关系中的任何小问题都会导致每天数百万桶的流量中断。再往北，任何离开滨海边疆区的东西都必须航行波罗的海和斯卡格拉克海峡，途经不少于七个海军能力过大的国家，这些国家往往对俄罗斯的一切事物怀有病态的恐惧和仇恨。除了德国。除了英国。
About half the flows terminate in end users like Germany, while the other half must be loaded on tankers for sail. That’s where things get extra dicey. In the Pacific, the Nakhodka port sits smack in the middle of Japanese, Chinese, and Korean spheres of influence. Any meaningful conflict involving any of the three and Nakhodka becomes either occupied or a crater.* Out to the west, exports via the Black Sea ports of Novorossiysk and Tuapse are fully dependent upon sails through downtown Istanbul, so any hiccup in relations with the Turks kills a couple million barrels of daily flows. Farther north, anything out of Primorsk has to sail the Baltic Sea and the Skagerrak strait, sailing by no fewer than seven navally overcapable-to-their-size countries that tend to nurse pathological fears and hatreds toward all things Russian. In addition to Germany. In addition to the United Kingdom.
即使这还不够，还有一个更复杂的因素。西伯利亚，尽管在10 月份已经冷到足以冻掉你的鼻子，但还不够冷。
Even if that were not enough, there’s one more complicating factor. Siberia, despite getting cold enough to literally freeze your nose off in October, doesn’t get cold enough.
俄罗斯的大部分石油生产都在永久冻土层中，在夏季的大部分时间里，永久冻土层都无法进入，因为它的顶层融化成凌乱的、横跨地平线的沼泽。在这里开采石油需要等待土地结冰，在荒地上修筑堤道，在西伯利亚的冬天钻井。如果俄罗斯原油的消耗出现问题，就会通过数千英里的管道回流到钻井现场。如果出口失败——无论是由于遥远的战争、对俄罗斯的战争，还是俄罗斯——只有一种缓解措施。全部关闭。重新开始生产需要手动检查从油井到边界的所有内容。上一次发生这种情况是在 1989 年苏联解体。在撰写本文时已经过去了 33 年，俄罗斯仍未恢复到冷战时期的生产水平。只有在冷战后以美国为首的秩序对石油如饥似渴的稳定时期，俄罗斯国际化石油联合体的当前迭代才有可能。随着乌克兰战争，它已经结束了。
Most Russian oil production is in the permafrost, and for most of the summer the permafrost is inaccessible because its top layer melts into a messy, horizon-spanning swamp. Tapping oil here requires waiting for the land to freeze, building dike roads across the wasteland, and drilling in the Siberian winter. Should something happen to consumption of Russian crude, flows back up through the literally thousands of miles of pipes right up to the drill site. Should exports fail—whether due to a war far away, a war on Russia, or a war by Russia—there is but one mitigation. Shut it all down. Turning production back on would require manually checking everything, all the way from the well to the border. The last time this happened was the Soviet collapse in 1989. Thirty-three years on at the time of this writing, Russia still hasn’t gotten back to its Cold War production levels. Only during the oil-ravenous stability of the post–Cold War period of the American-led Order is the current iteration of Russia’s internationalized oil complex even possible. And with the Ukraine War, it is already over.
全球原油的第三个也是最后一个主要来源在北美。
The third and final major source of global crude is within North America.
非洲大陆的许多石油产量都属于遗产的一般类别：在已经生产了一个多世纪的地区。墨西哥的第一批产品可以追溯到 1920 年代，从那以后一直为墨西哥提供其所需的一切，甚至更多。近年来，墨西哥的许多大片老油田都在放弃。部分原因是地质，但至少墨西哥州同样重要政策，通常禁止外国资本、专业知识和技术发挥很大作用。*事实证明，墨西哥人无法自行其是，既无法维持旧油田的生命维持，也无法在陆上或海上开发新发现。尽管如此，即使有这种明显的疲软，墨西哥的石油需求也大致平衡。它向美国出口一些原油，然后进口同样数量的精炼产品。总的来说，墨西哥每天生产和使用大约 2mbpd。
A lot of oil output on the continent falls into the general category of legacy: in regions that have been producing for upwards of a century. The first Mexican production dates all the way back to the 1920s and has been supplying Mexico with everything it needs and more ever since. In recent years many of Mexico’s large, old fields have been giving up the ghost. In part the reason is geology, but at least as important is Mexican state policy, which often bars foreign capital, expertise, and technology from playing much of a role at all.* Left to their own devices, the Mexicans are proving incapable at both keeping their old fields on life support and exploiting newer discoveries either on or offshore. Still, even with this glaring weakness, Mexico’s oil needs are roughly in balance. It exports some crude to the United States, and then imports a similar volume of refined product. On balance Mexico produces—and uses—about 2mbpd.
在北方，加拿大的石油行业在 1950 年代起步，在 1970 年代变得具有全球重要性。但直到 1980 年代，阿尔伯塔省才开始破解一些非常规产出的密码。传统上，石油通过岩层运移，直到到达不透水的岩层。例如，原油可能会通过砂岩迁移，但花岗岩会阻止它变冷。然后在不透水层后面形成压力。当钻头穿过盖子时，压力和油被释放。
Up north, the Canadian oil sector got its start in the 1950s, becoming globally significant in the 1970s. But it wasn’t until the 1980s that the province of Alberta started cracking the code on some seriously unconventional output. Traditionally, oil migrates through rock formations until it reaches an impermeable rock layer. For example, the crude might migrate through sandstone, but granite would stop it cold. Pressure then builds behind the impermeable layer. When a drill punches through the cap, the pressure—and oil—are released.
艾伯塔省的大部分石油都不是这样的。
Most of Alberta’s oil is nothing like that.
艾伯塔省的石油不是锁定在坚硬岩石后面的大型加压原油液池，而是通过软得多的岩石扩散，在功能上以固体形式整合到岩石基质中。将其取出需要向地层中注入蒸汽以熔化石油，或者将其开采并用热水将石油洗出。从那里，这种超稠原油必须与较轻的原油等级混合以使其变稀，以便可以通过传统管道泵送。
Instead of big, pressurized liquid pools of crude locked behind tough rock, Alberta’s oil is diffused through far softer rock, functionally integrated into the rock’s matrix in solid form. Getting it out requires either injecting steam into the formation to melt the oil out or mining it and washing the oil out with hot water. From there this ultra-thick crude oil must be mixed with lighter crude grades to thin it so it can be pumped via conventional pipeline.
无论如何衡量，加拿大的产量远远超过它的使用量。它的消费量与墨西哥相似，但出口量又一样多。阿尔伯塔省几乎所有的“油砂”产品都向南运往美国，主要是在得克萨斯州进行加工。
No matter how it is measured, Canada produces far more than it could ever use. It consumes a similar amount to Mexico, but exports that much again. Almost all of Alberta’s “oil sands” production is shipped south to the United States, mostly for processing in Texas.
在非洲大陆的中纬度地区，美国人拥有 . . . 发生了很多事情。他们在墨西哥湾有一个传统的离岸部门，直到 1970 年代才真正开始运作。仍然有传统的粗滴在宾夕法尼亚州和得克萨斯州以外的地方，这些地方的石油生产时间比地球上任何其他地方都长。直到最近，甚至加利福尼亚州也是该国最大的石油生产国之一，该国最多产的油井之一位于威尔希尔大道的一个购物中心，而另一口则巧妙地伪装成犹太教堂。
In the continent’s middle latitudes, the Americans have . . . a lot going on. They have a legacy offshore sector in the Gulf of Mexico that didn’t really get going until the 1970s. There’s still conventional crude trickling out of Pennsylvania and Texas in places that have been producing oil longer than any other spots on the planet. Even California was among the country’s largest oil producers until quite recently, with one of the country’s most prolific wells located in a mall on Wilshire Boulevard while another is cleverly disguised as a synagogue.
总而言之，美国的常规石油遗产仍然很可观：仍能产出约 4 mbpd，这一产量可与 1970 年代鼎盛时期的伊朗相提并论，与今天加拿大的总产量大致相同。
Taken together, the American conventional oil legacy remains substantial: still kicking out about 4mbpd, a volume that compares favorably to Iran at its 1970s height and is about the same as the total output from Canada today.
但真正的故事是新事物：美国的页岩油行业。
But the real story is the new stuff: America’s shale oil sector.
早在 2000 年代初期，石油世界就受到四件同时发生且互不相关的事件的冲击。首先，美国次级抵押贷款建设已经失控，对所有用于家庭建设的东西产生了不健康的需求：木材、混凝土、铜、钢。. . 和石油。其次，中国的繁荣有点疯狂。对价格不敏感的需求推高了全球所有商品的价格，包括石油。第三，2002 年委内瑞拉一场非常不成功的政变导致对该国国有石油公司的政治清洗非常成功——清洗的重点是生产石油的技术官僚。国家的能量部门从未恢复。第四，2003 年美国人入侵伊拉克，使其所有石油生产停产。十六年来，该国的产出没有恢复到战前水平。在需求增加和供应减少之间，油价从 1998 年的每桶 10 美元以下稳步攀升至 2008 年的每桶近 150 美元。
Back in the early 2000s the world of oil got slammed by four simultaneous and unrelated events. First, the U.S. subprime build was already getting out of hand, generating unhealthy levels of demand for all the things that go into home construction: lumber, concrete, copper, steel . . . and oil. Second, the Chinese boom was getting a touch insane. Price-insensitive demand drove up the price of all globally available commodities, oil included. Third, in 2002 a very unsuccessful coup in Venezuela led to a very successful political purge of the country’s state oil firm—a purge that focused on the technocrats who produced the oil. The country’s energy sector never recovered. Fourth, in 2003 the Americans invaded Iraq, taking all its oil output offline. The country didn’t return to prewar levels of output for sixteen years. Between higher demand and lower supplies, oil prices steadily climbed from below $10 a barrel in 1998 to nearly $150 a barrel in 2008.
当您的工作为您赚取 10 美元时，您往往会坚持久经考验的做法。当您的工作赚取 150 美元时，您可以负担得起尝试各种事情！
When your work earns you $10, you tend to stick to the tried-and-true. When your work earns you $150, you can afford to try all kinds of things!
经过几年的实验，美国集体能源联合体能够破解我们现在称之为“页岩革命”的密码。从本质上讲，页岩油作业者按正常方式向下钻探，但当他们到达富含石油的岩层时，他们会急转弯，沿整个层水平钻探。然后他们在高压下将水和沙子泵入地层。由于液体不会压缩，岩石会从内部裂开，释放出数以万亿计的微小石油和天然气，否则这些石油和天然气太小，无法通过常规钻探开采。悬浮在压裂液中的沙子支撑裂缝打开，而现在释放的油提供反向压力，将水推回管道。一旦水变清，油就会继续流动。瞧！一口页岩井诞生了。
With a few years of experimentation, the collective American energy complex was able to crack the code on something we now call the “shale revolution.” In essence, shale operators drill down as per normal, but when they reach a petroleum-rich rock strata they take a sharp turn, drilling horizontally along the entire layer. Then they pump water and sand at high pressure into the formation. Since liquids do not compress, the rock cracks apart from within, freeing untold trillions of tiny pockets of oil and natural gas that would otherwise be far too small to harvest with conventional drilling. The sand suspended in the frack fluid props the cracks open, while the now-freed oil provides reverse pressure that pushes the water back up the pipe. Once the water has cleared, the oil continues flowing. Voilà! A shale well is born.
在 2005 年页岩时代初期，这些水平井每个钻井平台只有 600 英尺长，每天只生产几十桶石油。截至 2022 年，许多较新的分支井都超过了两英里，其中许多井都拥有一棵名副其实的子分支分支树，每条分支分支的长度都超过一英里，所有分支井都连接到同一条垂直管道。随着从水资源管理到钻井设备到数据处理到地震成像再到泵动力的方方面面的改进，现在单井每天的产量超过 5,000 桶石油已经司空见惯——这一数字与美国的单页岩油井不相上下拥有伊拉克和沙特阿拉伯一些产量最高的油井。
At the dawn of the shale era in 2005, these horizontal wells were only 600 feet long per drilling platform and only produced a few dozen barrels of oil per day. As of 2022, many of the newer laterals are in excess of two miles, with many of the wells sporting a veritable tree of branches of sublaterals in excess of a mile long each, all connecting to the same vertical pipe. With improvements in everything from water management to drilling apparatuses to data processing to seismic imaging to pump power, it is now common to have individual wells kick out in excess of 5,000 barrels of oil a day—a figure that puts individual American shale wells on par with some of the most prolific oil wells in Iraq and Saudi Arabia.
总的来说，这些变化增加了大约 10 mbpd，使美国成为世界上最大的石油生产国，同时使其能够实现净石油独立。现在，该声明中确实存在大量的“是但”森林，包括原油质量、天然气、基础设施和气候变化等复杂问题——我们将一一解决——但中心要点很容易理解：世界能源与 15 年前相比，2022 年的地图完全不同，因为世界上最大的进口国已成为净出口国。
Collectively these changes have added some 10mbpd, making the United States the largest producer of oil in the world, while simultaneously enabling it to achieve net oil independence. Now there are a veritable forest of yes-buts in that statement, ranging from complications as regards crude quality, natural gas, infrastructure, and climate change—and we will get to them all—but the central takeaway is easily graspable: the world’s energy map is radically different in 2022 compared to how it looked just fifteen years ago because the world’s largest importer has become a net exporter.
页岩革命改变了支撑全球能源部门的战略数学，并随之改变了整个全球化。简而言之，波斯湾和前苏联地区的生产和出口都取决于美国的全球安全架构和外国技术人员进入这两个地区的能力。相比之下，北美的生产不依赖于两者。
The shale revolution has changed the strategic math that underpins the global energy sector, and with it, globalization as a whole. Put very simply and very directly, both production and exports from both the Persian Gulf and the former Soviet space are dependent upon both America’s global security architecture and the ability of foreign technicians to access both regions. In contrast, production within North America is dependent upon neither.
这一切都可能出错的可能性是无限的。这是一个示例。
There are no end of possibilities of where this can all go horribly wrong. Here’s a sampling.
- 美国已将其陆基和海军部队撤出波斯湾，让伊朗人和沙特人争论谁才是真正的负责人。处于危险之中：26.5mbpd。
- The United States has pulled its forces—land-based and naval—out of the Persian Gulf, leaving it to the Iranians and Saudis to argue over who is really in charge. At risk: 26.5mbpd.
- 印度通过扣押开往东亚的油轮来应对油价上涨。没有印度的积极同谋，任何东亚大国都没有能力向波斯湾投送海军力量。面临风险：来自霍尔木兹的 21 mbpd 出口流量，加上来自尼日利亚和安哥拉的另外 1.5 mbpd 出口到亚洲。
- India reacts to rising oil prices by seizing tankers bound for East Asia. No East Asian power has the capacity to project naval force to the Persian Gulf without active Indian complicity. At risk: 21mbpd of export flows from Hormuz, plus another 1.5mbpd from Nigeria and Angola that head to Asia.
- 埃及限制货物过境苏伊士。再次。面临风险：4.25mbpd 的出口流量，其中约 60% 通过运河旁路管道转运，因此可能容易受到埃及内部政治暴力的影响。
- Egypt restricts cargo transiting the Suez. Again. At risk: 4.25mbpd of export flows, about 60 percent of which is transshipped via canal bypass pipelines and so could prove vulnerable to internal Egyptian political violence.
- 在没有美国海军力量的情况下，海盗活动在西非和东非沿海地区泛滥成灾。面临风险：3.5 mbpd 的西非石油出口，加上从波斯湾到欧洲的任何长途运输，这些运输不明智地离岸太近。
- In the absence of American naval power, piracy blooms off the coasts of West and East Africa. At risk: 3.5mbpd of West African oil exports, plus any longer-haul shipments from the Persian Gulf to Europe that unwisely sail too close to shore.
- 对于如何解决地区安全问题，俄罗斯人与挪威人、瑞典人、芬兰人、波兰人、爱沙尼亚人、拉脱维亚人、立陶宛人和丹麦人有着截然不同的看法。面临风险：2mbpd 的俄罗斯出口流经波罗的海，2mbpd 的挪威石油产量。
- The Russians have very different views from the Norwegians, Swedes, Finns, Poles, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Danes as to how regional security issues should be resolved. At risk: 2mbpd of Russian export flows via the Baltic Sea and 2mbpd of Norwegian oil production.
- 石油专业知识的主要供应商——英国和美国——与俄罗斯坦克之间的关系。也许是因为有一场战争。面临风险：俄罗斯石油产量为 5 mbpd，阿塞拜疆和哈萨克斯坦各为 1 mbpd。
- Relations between the major suppliers of oil expertise—the United Kingdom and United States—and the Russians tank. Perhaps because there’s a war. At risk: 5mbpd of Russian oil production, and another 1mbpd each from Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan.
- 与伊斯兰相关的安全问题阻碍了外国石油工人留在伊拉克和沙特阿拉伯。面临风险：伊拉克石油产量为 2 mbpd，沙特产量为 6 mbpd。
- Islamist-related security concerns discourage foreign oil workers from remaining in Iraq and Saudi Arabia. At risk: 2mbpd of Iraqi oil production and 6mbpd of Saudi production.
- 西非和中非国家的内部政治是。. . 极其暴力。从 1967 年到 1970 年，尼日利亚为谁能控制该国的石油而爆发内战，导致约 200 万人死亡。撤掉美国的监督，事情可能会很快变得糟糕。面临风险：来自尼日利亚的 2mbpd 流量加上来自其他地区生产商的另外 1.5mbpd。
- The internal politics of the West and central African nations are . . . exceedingly violent. From 1967 to 1970 Nigeria fought a civil war over who got to control the country’s oil, resulting in the deaths of some two million people. Remove the American overwatch and things could get nasty fast. At risk: 2mbpd of flows from Nigeria plus another 1.5mbpd from the other regional producers.
- 如果俄罗斯和中国没有因为对美国的仇恨而联合起来，从前者到后者的石油运输就不是神圣不可侵犯的。两国在 1960 年代末因领土争端差点用核武器互相攻击，两国人民都对彼此有着令人印象深刻的种族主义，如果俄罗斯从不对中国使用能源杠杆，那么，中国将是唯一一个俄罗斯人没有玩过的国家卡与。面临风险：大约 1.8 mbpd 的直接俄罗斯货物，以及另外 200 kbpd 的中亚货物，俄罗斯人很容易干扰。
- Without Russia and China bonding over their hatred of the United States, oil shipments from the former to the latter are hardly sacrosanct. The two nearly nuked each other in the late 1960s over a territorial dispute, both peoples are impressively racist toward one another, and if Russia never uses energy leverage over China, well then, China would be the only country the Russians haven’t played that card with. At risk: roughly 1.8mbpd of direct Russian shipments, and another 200kbpd of Central Asian shipments that the Russians could easily interfere with.
即使是这份清单，也假定美国将对世界采取完全不干涉的态度，而不是可能成为破坏者。美国人喜欢实施制裁。在技术上。运输上。在财务上。保险上。这些制裁中的任何一项都可能影响产品在任何时间、任何地点流向任何人。作为西半球持续的安全保障者，将由美国人来决定是否有任何从西半球运出的地区性石油真的能生产出来。
Even this list assumes that the United States will take a fully hands-off approach to the world, instead of being perhaps a disruptor. Americans love levying sanctions. On technology. On transport. On finance. On insurance. Any of those sanctions can impact product flows anywhere, anytime, to anyone. And as the ongoing security guarantors of the Western Hemisphere, it will be up to the Americans to decide if any regional oil headed out of the hemisphere actually makes it.
虽然这些限制中的任何一个都可能根据该命令发生，但有几点需要牢记：
While it is true that any of these restrictions could have happened under the Order, there are a few things to keep in mind:
首先，维持全球石油流动符合美国的既得利益，这既是为了自身的经济福祉，也是为了更广泛的战略目标。这些担忧不再适用，没有其他国家拥有美国的技术能源敏锐度或军事影响力。
First, the United States had a vested interest in maintaining global oil flows, both for its own economic well-being as well as for its broader strategic goals. Those concerns no longer apply and no other country has America’s technical energy acumen or military reach.
其次，生产石油从来都不是免费的，而且往往甚至不便宜。委内瑞拉的石油生产非常困难，长期石油生产的前期投资约为每桶 4,000 美元。在廉价资本的后期秩序中，这是非常可行的。在混乱的受限财务条件下，情况并非如此。
Second, producing oil is never free, and oftentimes it isn’t even cheap. Venezuelan oil production is so difficult that up-front investments amount to roughly $4,000 per barrel of long-term oil production. In the late Order of cheap capital, that’s eminently doable. In the constrained financial conditions of the Disorder, not so much.
第三，由于供应集中，石油是航行最远到达目的地的产品。航行的时间越长，拥有一个风平浪静的安全环境就越重要。
Third, due to the concentration of supply, oil is the product that sails the farthest to reach its destination. The longer the sail, the more important it is to have a calm security environment.
四是石油项目进展不快。一个典型的陆上项目从首次评估到首次生产需要三到六年的时间。离岸项目通常需要十年或更长时间。
Fourth, oil projects are not quick. A typical onshore project requires three to six years between first evaluation and first production. Offshore projects typically take a decade or more.
到目前为止，这四个因素在教团期间协同工作的最好例子莫过于卡沙甘。但同样的逻辑也适用于整个前苏联世界和波斯湾的能源生产。
By far the best example of these four factors working together during the Order is none other than Kashagan. But the same logic applies to energy production throughout the former Soviet world and the Persian Gulf.
从未来世界的任何混乱中恢复过来将是困难的。首先要实现安全因素、成本投入、技术技能获取以及足够长的时间框架来生产原油的神奇组合，对于世界大部分地区来说根本不可行。一旦生产下线，绝大多数地方都不会出现反弹。当然不是一个快速的。
Recovering from any disruptions in the world to come will be difficult. Achieving the magic constellation of security factors, cost inputs, technical skill access, and a sufficiently long time frame to produce the crude in the first place simply won’t be viable for large portions of the world. Once production goes offline, a bounceback simply won’t be in the cards for the vast majority of locations. Certainly not a quick one.
具体细节将与订单后的其他混乱一样疯狂和不可预测，但一个好的起点是假设全球供应的 40% 落入 Kashagan 式桶：太危险的出口路线无法在全球化结束时生存，如果没有外部融资，项目成本太高无法维持，如果没有大批外地工人，技术上太难运作。这样的项目将消失，几十年都不会回来。如果曾经。石油缺席几周，更不用说几十年，就足以让我们所知的现代文明崩溃。
The specifics will be as wild and unpredictable as the rest of the post-Order chaos, but a good starting point is to assume that 40 percent of global supplies fall into the Kashagan-style bucket: too-dangerous export routes to survive globalization’s end, too-expensive projects to maintain without outside financing, too difficult technically to operate without an army of out-of-region workers. Such projects will go away and not come back for decades. If ever. And oil’s absence for a few weeks, never mind a few decades, would be more than enough to crash modern civilization as we know it.
这甚至不足以预示即将到来的破坏范围。
That’s not even a remotely sufficient foreshadowing of the scope of the disruptions to come.
石油不仅仅是石油
There’s More to Oil than Oil
石油不是“普通”产品。在它独特的无数方面中，有七项考虑到世界即将发现自己所处环境的彻底变化。
Oil is no “normal” product. Of the myriad ways in which it is unique, seven bear consideration for the utter change in circumstance the world is about to find itself in.
无弹性
INELASTICITY
快速经济学 101 课。一般情况下，价格是供求关系的结果。如果供应增加而需求保持不变，价格就会下降。同样，如果需求增加而供应保持不变，价格就会上涨。这两个陈述的反面也是正确的。这个概念称为价格弹性，它适用于从滑板到面包、盆栽植物到建筑工人的所有事物。*
Quick Economics 101 lesson. Under normal circumstances, prices are the result of the relationship between supply and demand. Should supply rise while demand remains constant, prices will drop. Similarly, should demand rise while supplies remain constant, prices will rise. The inverse for both statements is true as well. This concept is called price elasticity and it holds true for everything from skateboards to bread to potted plants to construction workers.*
石油是不同的。因为石油是一切事物的核心，从屋顶上的瓦片到手中的电话，再到厨房的抹刀，再到管道中的管道和软管，再到孩子的尿布，再到墙壁上的油漆，再到日常通勤产品越过海洋，石油需求的轻微增加或石油供应的轻微减少都会导致价格剧烈波动，而这种波动肯定是不成比例的。也许更重要的是，石油是运输燃料。没有油，你的车就不能开。那艘巨型集装箱船也没有带你来自韩国的闪亮的新洗衣机。你。必须。有。它。细节因地而异，因时而异，但一个好的经验法则是，需求变化约 10% 会导致价格变化约 75%。
Oil is different. Because oil is central to everything from the shingles on your roof to the phone in your hand to the spatula in your kitchen to the pipes and hoses in your plumbing to the diapers on your kid to the paint on your walls to your daily commute to how products cross the ocean, a slight increase in demand for oil or a slight decrease in supply for oil results in wild price swings that are most assuredly not proportional. Perhaps even more important, oil is the transport fuel. No oil and your car doesn’t work. Neither does that giant container ship bringing you that shiny new washing machine from Korea. You. Must. Have. It. The details vary from place to place and time to time, but a good rule of thumb is that a change in demand of about 10 percent results in a price shift around 75 percent.
在 2000 年代，当供需特别失衡时，价格没过多久就上涨了 500%。同样，当美国次级抵押贷款泡沫在全球金融危机的背景下破裂时，随后的需求下降迅速使石油回吐了这些价格涨幅的五分之四左右。
During the 2000s, when supply and demand were particularly out of whack, it didn’t take long for prices to increase by 500 percent. Similarly, when the American subprime bubble burst in the context of a global financial crisis, the subsequent drop in demand quickly made oil give back some four-fifths of those price gains.
颠覆性
DISRUPTABILITY
所有产品都在海洋中航行，因此所有产品都面临一定程度的风险，但并非所有产品都是平等的。无论您是在评估切割木材还是搅拌碗的供应链，几乎所有东西都有不同的来源和供应路线，可以根据市场要求变得活跃。
All products travel the ocean, so all products face a degree of risk moving forward, but all products are not created equal. Whether you’re evaluating the supply chain of cut lumber or mixing bowls, pretty much everything has different sources and supply routes that can become active as the market dictates.
石油是不同的。由于每个人都必须拥有它，而且只有少数几个地方可以出口，因此运输路线更加集中。更有问题的是，这些供应线中最粗的一条非常长。从波斯湾流出的水流必须经过 5,000 到 7,000 英里才能到达东亚目的地，必须经过 3,000 到 6,000 英里才能到达欧洲目的地，而要经过 5,000 到 9,000 英里才能到达北美目的地。其他小供应商也好不到哪儿去。例如，委内瑞拉有时将原油绕过南美洲并穿越太平洋运往中国北部——长达 12,000 英里的航程是世界上最长的供应线路，实际上比绕地球的一半还要长。
Oil is different. Since everyone has to have it, and since only a few places produce it in exportable volumes, the transport routes are far more concentrated. Even more problematic, the thickest of these supply lines are very long. Flows out of the Persian Gulf must travel between 5,000 and 7,000 miles to East Asian destinations, between 3,000 to 6,000 miles to European destinations, and 5,000 to 9,000 miles to North American destinations. Other minor suppliers aren’t any better. Venezuela, for example, has on occasion shipped crude around South America and across the Pacific to northern China—a 12,000-mile journey that is the world’s longest supply run, literally longer than halfway around the planet.
这显然是个问题。油轮很容易识别，行进速度很慢，而且别无选择，只能坚持走最短的路线，而这条路线已经很长了。对于这些石油运输中的大部分，没有好的替代品。几乎所有源自波斯湾的石油都必须使用霍尔木兹海峡。甚至旁路管道的使用也受到限制，因为它们终止于霍尔木兹岛的东侧或红海，那里的货物仍然需要通过苏伊士运河或曼德海峡。绕过马六甲海峡还需要在不同的地点打通印度尼西亚群岛。最后，很多这些货物的终点是一个不可避免的困难地点，无论是在南海、东海、日本海、地中海还是北海。
This is obviously a problem. Oil tankers are pretty easy to identify, they travel slowly, and they have little choice but to stick to the shortest possible route, which is already pretty long. For most of those oil shipments, there are no good alternatives. Nearly all oil that originates in the Persian Gulf must use the Strait of Hormuz. Even bypass pipelines have limited use since they terminate either on the eastern side of Hormuz or in the Red Sea, where shipments still need to go through either Suez or the Bab el-Mandeb. Bypassing the Strait of Malacca still requires punching through the Indonesian archipelago at a different location. And in the end, the terminus point for a lot of these shipments is an unavoidable location-of-difficulty, whether it be in the South China Sea, the East China Sea, the Sea of Japan, the Mediterranean, or the North Sea.
密不可分
INSEPARABILITY
该秩序的众多变革性影响之一是将整个世界合并为一个单一市场。除了少数例外，产品可以从高供应地区流向高需求地区。对于大多数产品来说，这会缓和任何价格冲击，因为通常在某处有额外的东西可以用来向陷入困境的需求水域注入新鲜的供应油。
One of the many transformative impacts of the Order was the combining of the entire world into a single market. With few exceptions, products can flow from areas of high supply to high demand. For most products, this mellows any price shocks because there is typically extra stuff somewhere that can be used to pour fresh supply oil on troubled demand waters.
价格缺乏弹性的石油恰恰相反。供应或需求的任何突然变化都会迅速波及整个系统。例如，1997-98 年的亚洲金融危机可能只对石油需求产生了边际影响，而且只是在区域范围内，但这些微小的变化使原油价格暴跌了一半以上。在全球范围内。这将世界大部分地区锁定在某种自杀协议中。任何生产区或任何运输路线沿线发生的任何中断都将在整个世界引起反响。
Oil, with its price inelasticity, does the opposite. Any sudden change in supply or demand rapidly ripples throughout the entire system. For example, the Asian financial crisis of 1997–98 may have only impacted oil demand on the margin and only on a regional basis, but those small changes crashed the price of crude by more than half. Globally. This locks much of the world into a bit of a suicide pact. Any disruptions that occur in any production zone or along any transport route will reverberate through the entire world.
会有一些例外，分为两大类：
There will be a few exceptions, which fall into two general categories:
首先是那些能够在军事上指挥从附近特定生产区运出货物的原始帝国。这种插话通常不会干净利落，也不会受到石油生产商的欢迎，但它们仍然会发生。第二组例外涉及在国内生产所需原油的大国，因此可以通过大笔一挥或开关翻转来阻止出口。
First are those proto-empires that are able to militarily command shipments out of specific nearby production areas. Such interjections will not typically be clean, easy, or welcomed by the oil producers, but they will happen nonetheless. The second set of exceptions involves the major powers who produce the crude they need internally and so can block exports with a few pen flicks or switch flips.
在这两种类型的区域系统中，石油经济学将与前秩序世界中建立的模型相呼应。每个系统都有自己的供需机制、自己的安全风险溢价、自己的粗等级模式，最重要的是自己的定价逻辑。
In both types of regional systems, the economics of oil will echo models established in the pre-Order world. Each system will have its own supply and demand mechanics, its own security risk premiums, its own crude grade patterns, and above all its own pricing logic.
- 这些口袋中最容易预测的是美国。大多数传统油井需要多年的工作才能投产，但页岩油井只需要几周时间。预计即将被隔离的美国市场的任何价格飙升都将很容易得到缓解，相当平稳的价格结构最高约为每桶 70 美元。（由于所有有意义的加拿大出口基础设施都在美国领土上终止，因此加拿大将被带走。）
- The easiest of these pockets to predict is the United States. Most conventional oil wells take years of work to bring online, but shale wells only need a few weeks. Expect any price spikes in the soon-to-be-sequestered American market to be easily ameliorated, with a fairly even-keeled price structure topping out at roughly $70 a barrel. (Canada will be brought along for the ride since all meaningful Canadian export infrastructure terminates on U.S. territory.)
- 紧随其后的是俄罗斯。自冷战结束以来，虽然俄罗斯的民用技术敏锐度几乎崩溃，但俄罗斯的工业能力也是如此。最终结果释放了 500万桶石油和大约 100 亿立方英尺的天然气用于每日出口。俄罗斯人从来都不是现代资本主义规范的奴隶，未来也不会例外。我非常有信心，随着时间的推移，俄罗斯在资本、劳动力和技术指挥方面的短缺将侵蚀一切这些出口。然而，这里的关键词是“及时”。在不涉及蘑菇云或极端内乱的任何情况下，至少在 2040 年代初之前，俄罗斯人将拥有足够的能源来满足自己的需求。由于俄罗斯本质上是一个封闭的系统，内部能源价格将完全按照克里姆林宫的规定行事。
- A close second is Russia. While Russian civilian technological acumen has all but collapsed since the Cold War’s end, so too has Russian industrial capacity. The end result has freed up five million barrels of oil and around 10 billion cubic feet of natural gas for daily export. The Russians have never been slaves to modern capitalistic norms, and the future will be no exception. I have exceedingly high confidence that in time, Russian shortages in capital, labor, and technical command will erode away all of those exports. The key words here, however, are “in time.” Under any scenario that doesn’t involve mushroom clouds or extreme civil breakdown, the Russians will have more than sufficient energy for their own needs at least until the early 2040s. And since Russia will in essence be a closed system, internal energy prices will be precisely what the Kremlin decrees them to be.
- 阿根廷可能会经历一个与美国并无太大区别的石油系统。尽管有些疯狂。. . 通过创新的经济管理方法，阿根廷已经拥有世界第二先进的页岩油行业，以及将当地页岩油产量输送到其人口中心所需的所有基础设施。
- Argentina is likely to experience an oil system not all that different from the United States. Despite some wildly . . . creative approaches to economic management, Argentina already has the world’s second-most-advanced shale sector as well as all the infrastructure necessary to bring local shale output to its population centers.
- 法国和土耳其看起来也不错。两者都靠近区域能源生产国——法国的阿尔及利亚和利比亚，土耳其的阿塞拜疆和伊拉克——以及使这些油田运作所需的当地技术技能。也就是说，确保上述产出将需要对他们的地区采取新殖民主义方式，而这将产生 . . . 戏剧。
- France and Turkey also look fairly good. Both are proximate to regional energy producers—Algeria and Libya for France, Azerbaijan and Iraq for Turkey—as well as sporting the local technical skills required to make those oil patches work. That said, securing said output will require a neocolonial approach to their regions, and that will generate . . . drama.
- 接下来是英国、印度和日本。所有人都需要冒险，但所有人都或多或少地拥有规模合适的海军力量来接触潜在资源。在这方面，英国人最容易进行短途旅行；挪威提供当地补给，而英国海军可以轻松到达西非以取得平衡。印第安人看起来也不错：波斯湾距离酒店仅几步之遥。日本变得有点冒险。诚然，日本拥有世界上第二强大的远程海军，但波斯湾的油田距离我们有7000英里之遥。在能够满足其需求的国家中，日本将面临最大的中断、短缺和高价格风险。
- The United Kingdom, India, and Japan are up next. All need to venture out, but all have naval forces more or less right-sized to reach potential sources. In this the Brits have the easiest jaunts to make; Norway provides local supplies, while the British navy can easily reach West Africa for the balance. The Indians look good, too: the Persian Gulf is only a short hop away. Japan gets a bit dicey. Sure, Japan sports the world’s second-most-powerful long-reach navy, but the Persian Gulf oil fields are a daunting seven thousand miles away. Of the countries that can secure their needs, it is Japan that will face the greatest risk of disruptions, shortages, and high prices.
在这个简短的状态列表之外，图片以各种可以想象的方式变暗。如果没有主导 1945 年后世界的供应冗余和多样性，任何一次运输中断都会立即导致价格暴涨。更糟糕的是，世界上许多石油供应商并不处于我所说的特别稳定的区域。*如果一个领域受到破坏——无论是由于好战、战争、无能还是缺乏维护——它不会简单地离线，而是离线多年。
Outside of this short list of states, the picture darkens in every conceivable way. Without the supply redundancy and variety that has dominated the post-1945 world, any single shipment interruption spells immediate price explosions. Even worse, many of the world’s oil suppliers are not in what I’d call particularly stable areas.* Should a field become damaged—either by militancy, war, incompetency, or lack of maintenance—it doesn’t simply go offline, it goes offline for years.
预计价格将非常不稳定，只有在极少数情况下才会跌破每桶 150 美元。假设可以采购供应品。
Expect prices to be wildly erratic, dropping below $150 a barrel only on painfully rare occasions. Assuming supplies can be sourced at all.
备份不只是备份
THE BACKUP ISN’T MUCH OF A BACKUP
全球石油远不止波斯湾、前苏联和北美的主要产油区。感觉其中一些应该能够帮助解决未来的问题。这有一点道理，但只有一点点。
There is far more to global oil than just the major production zones in the Persian Gulf, former Soviet Union, and North America. It feels like some of them should be able to help smooth out the problems of the future. There is a little truth to this, but only a little.
考虑候选人：
Consider the candidates:
让我们从好消息开始：西半球国家哥伦比亚、秘鲁以及特立尼达和多巴哥。没有一家是大型生产商，但都是相当稳定的生产商。在后秩序世界中，美国人将在整个半球建立安全警戒线，防止欧亚大国涉足。贸易将被允许。甚至拉丁美洲的石油产品出口到东半球也将被视为无害——只要没有东半球大国建立美国人认为具有战略意义的足迹。这三个人可能不是大玩家——我们谈论的总和不超过每天 100 万桶——但至少美国人能够而且将会确保地球上他们这一边的任何运输的海上安全。
Let’s start with the good news: the Western Hemispheric countries of Colombia, Peru, and Trinidad and Tobago. None are huge producers but all are reasonably stable ones. In a post-Order world the Americans will establish a security cordon around the entire hemisphere to keep the Eurasian powers from dabbling. Trade will be allowed. Even the export of Latin American oil products to the Eastern Hemisphere will be seen as harmless—so long as no Eastern Hemispheric power establishes a footprint that the Americans perceive as strategic. This trio might not be big players—collectively we’re not talking about much more than one million barrels per day—but at minimum the Americans can and will ensure maritime security for any transport on their side of the planet.
巴西有点复杂。巴西的大部分生产都在海上进行，而且其大部分真正有前途的油田不仅在两英里的海洋以下，而且在另外两英里的海床以下。巴西能源的经营环境非常艰难，生产成本非常高，政治背景也非常具有挑战性。问题不亚于巴西作为一个国家未来的凝聚力。该秩序对巴西来说是完美的：庞大的全球市场、无底的中国需求、廉价的全球融资。由于巴西的热带和崎岖地形使其成为世界上开发成本最高的国家之一。. . 一切，太棒了。这一切都在消失，只是不清楚秩序的另一边是否会有足够的技术能力强、资金充裕的外国合作伙伴。数千亿美元的投资。
Brazil is a bit more complicated. Most of Brazil’s production is offshore and most of its truly promising fields are not simply under two miles of ocean, but under an additional two miles of seabed. Brazilian energy presents very difficult operating environments, very high production costs, and a very challenging political backdrop. The problem is nothing less than the future coherence of Brazil as a state. The Order has been perfect for Brazil: large global markets, bottomless Chinese demand, cheap global financing. As Brazil’s tropical and rugged geography saddles it with among the world’s highest development costs for . . . everything, that has been fantastic. It’s all going away, and it just isn’t clear if there will be sufficient technically capable, capital-flush foreign partners on the other side of the Order. Even if the answer proves to be an enthusiastic “yes,” large-scale Brazilian output sufficient to generate large exports is a minimum of two decades and hundreds of billions of dollars of investment away.
委内瑞拉曾经很重要。它曾经是世界上最可靠的生产商和出口商之一。通过许多措施，在加拉加斯做出的决定最终打破了 1970 年代的阿拉伯石油禁运。那些日子早已过去。两年多来可怕的、蓄意的、越来越有创意和暴力的管理不善几乎摧毁了该国的能源综合体。产量比峰值下降了 90% 以上，开采和运输基础设施正在崩溃，政府内部泄密表明该国的石油储量受到无法弥补的破坏。
Venezuela used to matter. It used to be among the world’s most reliable producers and exporters. By many measures, decisions made in Caracas ultimately broke the Arab Oil Embargos of the 1970s. Those days are long past. Two-plus decades of horrific, deliberate, and increasingly creative and violent mismanagement all but destroyed the country’s energy complex. Output is down by more than 90 percent from peak, extraction and transport infrastructure is crumbling, and internal government leaks suggest irreparable damage to the country’s petroleum reservoirs.
委内瑞拉的大部分石油过去都运往美国，但美国炼油商已放弃让委内瑞拉重返市场，因此对设备进行了改造，以使用不同的输入流进行操作。随着美国人不再感兴趣，委内瑞拉甚至不再有专门购买其特定超重质原油等级的买家。政府财政崩溃，粮食生产和粮食进口都停滞不前。饥荒现在是该国最好的情景之一，文明彻底崩溃的可能性更大。
Most of Venezuela’s oil used to go to the United States, but American refiners have given up on Venezuela ever returning to the market, and so have retooled their equipment to operate using different input streams. With the Americans no longer interested, Venezuela no longer even has dedicated buyers for its specific ultraheavy crude grades. Government finances have collapsed and taken down both food production and food imports within them. Famine is now among the country’s better-case scenarios, with outright civilizational collapse more likely.
如果委内瑞拉——正确的词是“如果”——要为全球石油供应做出贡献，就需要有人向该国部署部队以加强安全，阻止垮台，并带来数十亿美元的物资来支持人民和数百亿美元用于改革能源基础设施，同时说服美国人他们不会尝试任何可爱的事情。不可能的？不，但至少这将是一个为期三年的重建项目。如果委内瑞拉的一个石油产区——特别是马拉开波——分离，一个稍微更有可能的结果是来自委内瑞拉并寻求外国保护，最有可能直接来自美国，或来自邻国哥伦比亚。这可能会以“仅”几年和 300 亿美元左右的投资，将几百万桶的日产量带回市场。
If Venezuela—and the correct word is “if”—is to contribute to global oil supplies, someone will need to deploy forces to the country to impose security, arrest the fall, and bring in billions of dollars of supplies to support the population and tens of billions to overhaul the energy infrastructure, all while convincing the Americans that they won’t try anything cute. Impossible? No. But at a minimum it would be a three-decade reconstruction project. A slightly more likely outcome would be if one of Venezuela’s oil regions—specifically the Maracaibo—were to secede from Venezuela and seek foreign protection, most likely either from the United States directly, or from neighboring Colombia. That could potentially bring a couple of million barrels of daily output back to markets with an investment of “only” a few years and $30 billion or so.
尼日利亚、赤道几内亚和安哥拉等西非国家对于外国石油公司来说，经营环境一直是简略的。这主要是一个安全问题。非洲国家在控制自己领土方面的记录不佳，这常常让外国人成为绑架、破坏或更糟的牺牲品——即使是假设石油生产不会成为内部政治争吵的牺牲品。它是做什么的。不断地。在后秩序世界中，这种内部安全担忧几乎肯定会加剧，这将迫使大多数外国参与者专注于非常具体的生产类型：那些在离海岸线数十英里的深海中的生产。此类海上平台必然需要军事化，以防止海盗袭击。最有可能参与的西方国家是那些与西非人最接近并拥有接触到他们的技术和军事能力的国家：英国和法国。前方肯定有波涛汹涌的大海，但这三个非洲国家可能会在未来几十年内为东半球的石油市场带来小小的好消息。
The western African states of Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, and Angola have always been sketchy operating environments for foreign oil firms. It is largely a security issue. The African states have a poor track record of controlling their own territories, which often leaves foreigners prey to kidnapping, sabotage, or worse—and even that assumes oil production does not fall prey to internal political squabbles. Which it does. Constantly. In a post-Order world such internal security concerns are all but certain to intensify, which will force most foreign players to focus on very specific sorts of production: those in the deep offshore, dozens of miles from the coastline. Such offshore platforms will by necessity need to be militarized to prevent pirate assault. The Western countries most likely to play are those that have the most proximity to the West Africans as well as the technical and military capacity to reach them: the United Kingdom and France. There definitely are rough seas ahead, but it is this trio of African states that is likely to generate what little good news the oil markets of the Eastern Hemisphere will see in the next few decades.
在东南亚，澳大利亚、文莱、印度尼西亚等国家，马来西亚、泰国和越南都是合理的生产国。然而，近几十年来，这些国家经历了充分的经济增长，以至于不断增长的区域石油需求吞噬了几乎所有可用的区域供应。总的来说，这些国家不再是重要的石油净出口国。而且这还没有考虑地缘政治偏好。该地区不仅与制造业一体化紧密联系在一起，而且还与一系列基本上友好合作的政治和安全协定紧密联系在一起。他们真的更希望这个日益混乱的世界的其余部分直接退出。如果可以的话，他们会挖一个洞然后把它拉进去。
In Southeast Asia, the countries of Australia, Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam are all reasonable producers. However, in recent decades these countries have experienced sufficient economic growth that rising regional oil demand has gobbled up nearly all available regional supply. Collectively, these countries are no longer significant net exporters of oil. And that’s before geopolitical preferences are factored in. This region is tightly bound together with not only manufacturing integration, but a series of largely friendly and cooperative political and security pacts. They would really prefer that the rest of an increasingly chaotic world would just butt out. They’d dig a hole and pull it in after them if they could.
北海是欧洲仅存的重要生产区，大部分产量位于该海域的挪威海域。挪威人与他们在瑞典、芬兰和丹麦的文化表亲以及他们的主要海上邻国英国有着良好的关系。直言不讳地说，这整个国家名单很可能会发现自己在法国和德国前进的对立面，而且他们已经在俄罗斯人的铁丝网对立面。为了保护自己，这个集体几乎肯定会采取联合行动，以防止北海能量流向他们团体成员以外的任何地方。如果你在俱乐部，那就太好了。如果你不是，那就更少了。
The North Sea is Europe’s only significant remaining production zone, with the vast bulk of the output lying in the sea’s Norwegian sector. The Norwegians enjoy excellent relations with their cultural cousins in Sweden, Finland, and Denmark, as well as their primary maritime neighbor, the United Kingdom. To be perfectly blunt, this entire roster of countries is likely to find themselves on opposite sides of the table from both the French and Germans moving forward, and they are already on the opposite sides of barbed wire from the Russians. In order to preserve themselves, this collective is all but certain to take joint action to prevent North Sea energy from going anywhere except to the members of their group. That’s great if you’re in the club. Less so if you’re not.
阿尔及利亚几十年来一直是主要生产国，其产量帮助缓解了波斯湾如此可靠地造成的一些定价混乱。这种情况不会持续太久。在后秩序世界中，将很少有国家能够照顾到自己的经济和安全需求，而在这个极短名单中名列前茅的国家就是法国。. . 它与阿尔及利亚隔着地中海。法国是阿尔及利亚的前殖民主人，分手是。. . 粗糙的。阿尔及利亚最好的举动可能是接近西班牙或意大利并向他们提供物资，这样阿尔及尔就不必与法国人打交道。它甚至可能起作用。除此之外，阿尔及利亚人可以期待法国人吞噬他们的全部能源出口能力。至少法国人会为此付出代价。大概。
Algeria has been a major producer for decades, and its output has helped mitigate some of the pricing chaos the Persian Gulf so reliably creates. That’s not going to happen for much longer. In the post-Order world there will be exceedingly few countries that can look out for their own economic and security needs, and the country at the top of that very short list is France . . . which sits directly across the Mediterranean from Algeria. France was Algeria’s former colonial master and the breakup was . . . rough. The best Algerian move will likely be to approach either Spain or Italy and offer them supplies so that Algiers won’t have to deal with the French. It might even work. Barring that, the Algerians can look forward to the French gobbling up their entire energy export capacity. At least the French will pay for it. Probably.
利比亚将变得更加混乱，因为它就是利比亚。至少有 3 次重大叛乱，在持续的内战中，这是一个我的直觉告诉我完全注销的地方。但还有意大利。在一个前苏联和波斯湾原油变得紧缩、法国事实上接管阿尔及利亚油田的世界里，利比亚成为意大利唯一的石油的来源。除非意大利人选择放弃他们国家的存在，否则他们别无选择，只能冒险夺取利比亚的主要港口、利比亚沙漠深处的生产基地以及其间所有连接的基础设施。考虑到意大利标志性的混乱、在殖民占领方面的普遍失职，以及在阿拉伯人方面的赤裸裸的种族主义，这段历史小篇章肯定会很有趣。和可怕的。
Libya will get messier because it is, well, Libya. Home to at least three major insurrections, in the middle of an ongoing civil war, it is a place my gut tells me to simply write off completely. But then there’s Italy. In a world in which former Soviet and Persian Gulf crude becomes constricted and France de facto takes over Algerian fields, Libya becomes Italy’s only source of oil. Unless the Italians choose to give up on their country’s existence, they will have no choice but to venture forth to secure Libya’s major ports, Libya’s production sites deep in the desert, and all the connecting infrastructure in between. Considering Italy’s trademark disorganization, general out-of-practiceness when it comes to colonial occupations, and flat-out racism when it comes to Arabs, this little chapterette of history is certain to be entertaining. And horrifying.
那么还剩多少呢？
So how much is left?
排除北美、北海、北非或东南亚等地的自备供应，以及来自波斯湾和前苏联地区的明显易受干扰的供应，然后将北美和俄罗斯等地满足当地需求的供应放入不同的桶，全球可出口的、有点可靠的供应总量每天只有微不足道的 600 万桶。. . 而全球需求为 9700 万。
Factor out captive supplies in places like North America, the North Sea, North Africa, or Southeast Asia, and eminently disruptable supplies from the Persian Gulf and former Soviet space, then put supplies for local demand in places like North America and Russia into a different bucket, and total exportable, kinda-sorta-reliable supplies globally only amount to a paltry 6 million barrels per day . . . versus a global demand of 97 million.
油比油更重要
THERE IS MORE TO OIL THAN OIL
没有人会简单地将原油放入油箱中。它必须首先在炼油厂进行加工。石油供应链可能不像计算机供应链那么复杂，但结果可能要戏剧化得多。没有两种原油流具有完全相同的化学成分。有些是粘稠的，富含杂质，最常见的是硫，按体积计，硫占原油的 3%。这种原油被称为“重酸”。有些，比如加拿大的油砂，非常重，在室温下是固体。其他的非常纯净，具有指甲油去除剂的颜色和稠度，被称为“轻质糖果”。
No one simply puts raw oil in their tank. It must first be processed at a refinery. The supply chains of oil may not be nearly as complicated as they are for, say, computers, but the outcomes can be far more dramatic. No two crude oil streams have exactly the same chemical makeup. Some are gooey and laden with impurities, most commonly sulfur, which can make up to 3 percent of the crude oil by volume. Such crudes are called “heavy sours.” Some, like Canada’s oil sands, are so heavy that they are solid at room temperature. Others are so pure they have the color and consistency of nail polish remover and are called “light sweets.”
在这两个极端之间存在着大量其他可能性，每种可能性都有其特定的化学成分。世界上数百家炼油厂中的每家都有一种首选的输入混合物，对于许多老炼油厂来说，这种混合物是为特定的油田量身定制的。这也是命令的结果。在一个安全的世界里，没有什么能阻止来自任何特定来源的原油到达任何特定的处理器。但是后订单？扰乱上游生产模式或中游运输模式的任何事物也会扰乱能源行业下游炼油厂的一切。
Between these extremes lies an entire worldful of other possibilities, each with its own specific chemical makeup. Each of the world’s hundreds of refineries has a preferred input blend, which in the case of many older refineries was tailored to a specific oil field. This too is an outcome of the Order. In a safe world, there was nothing stopping crude from any particular source from reaching any particular processor. But post-Order? Anything that scrambles upstream production patterns or midstream transport patterns also scrambles everything in the energy sector’s refinery downstream.
在最坏的情况下使用“错误的”原油可能会对价值数十亿美元的设施造成重大损失。即使在最好的情况下，也肯定会触发所谓的运行损失，这是一个不太花哨的术语，其含义正是它所暗示的：由于不适当的输入混合，通过炼油厂进行加工的一定比例的原油只是损失了. 当炼油厂被要求做一些它不应该做的事情，或者当它无法获得“正确的”原油混合物时，运行损失会迅速增加。例如，欧洲人喜欢柴油和俄罗斯的乌拉尔混合原油（中质/含硫原油）是精炼柴油的非常好的原料。中断乌拉尔的流动，用不同等级的原油代替乌拉尔，欧洲人将面临严重的产品瓶颈，即使他们能够以某种方式让他们的炼油厂以设计产能运行。考虑到石油价格缺乏弹性的问题，即使是 1% 的炼油厂损失也会对客户产生巨大影响。
Running the “wrong” crude in the worst case can cause major damage to multibillion-dollar facilities. Even in the best case it is certain to trigger something called run-loss, a not-so-fancy term that means exactly what it suggests: a certain percentage of the crude run through a refinery for processing is simply lost due to inappropriate input mixes. Run-loss increases quickly either when a refinery is asked to do something it was not designed to do or when it lacks access to the “correct” crude oil blend. The Europeans, for example, love diesel, and Russia’s Urals blend (a medium/sour crude) is a pretty good feedstock for refining diesel. Interrupt Urals flows, replace Urals with a different crude grade, and the Europeans are going to face serious product bottlenecks even if they can somehow keep their refineries running at their designed capacity. Considering oil’s price inelasticity issue, something as little as a 1 percent refinery loss can have massive impacts on customers.
我们正在寻找超过 1% 的运行损失。世界上大多数炼油厂都设计为使用更轻、更甜的原油，因为它们的污染物更少，因此更容易加工。今天，世界上大多数更轻、更甜的原油都来自美国的页岩油田。翻新炼油厂是可以做到的，但新世界需要两样东西供不应求：时间和金钱。此外，大多数重组只是将您锁定在一个新的原始公式中。在一个不稳定的世界中，特定原始输入流的可靠性只有在您非常接近安全来源时才会出现。对于大多数炼油厂来说，这根本不可能。
We’re looking at a lot more than 1 percent run-loss moving forward. Most of the world’s refineries were designed to run on lighter, sweeter crudes because they have fewer contaminants and so are easier to process. Today most of the world’s lighter, sweeter crudes come from American shale plays. Refurbishing refineries can be done, but it takes two things the new world will have in short supply: time and money. Besides, most retooling simply locks you into a new crude formula. In an unstable world, reliability of specific crude input streams can occur only if you are very close to the secure source. For most refineries, that’s simply not a possibility.
油比油更重要
THERE’S EVEN MORE TO OIL THAN OIL
还有一种叫做天然气的东西，它与石油一起是经典的化石燃料之一。
There’s also something called natural gas, which along with oil is one of the classic fossil fuels.
在很多方面，两者是相似的。两者都有相同的三个供应集中地：波斯湾、前苏联和北美。两者都具有相同的三个需求集中点：东北亚、欧洲和北美。两者都可以用于类似的事情，从运输燃料到石化原料。
In many ways, the two are similar. Both have the same three concentrations of supply: the Persian Gulf, the former Soviet Union, and North America. Both have the same three concentrations of demand: Northeast Asia, Europe, and North America. Both can be used for similar things, ranging from a transport fuel to a petrochemical feedstock.
然而，它们确实有一个关键的区别，决定了它们的使用、流行程度和影响。
They do, however, have a critical difference that shapes their use, their prevalence, and their impact.
油是液体。它可以通过管道、驳船、油轮或卡车移动，并可以储存在非加压罐中。主要港口的大型油罐甚至有浮动盖，可随液位上升和下降。
Oil is a liquid. It can be moved by pipe or barge or tanker or truck, and can be stored in a nonpressurized tank. Large oil tanks at major ports even have floating lids that rise and fall with the fill level.
你不可能用天然气做到这一点。它是一个 。. . 气体。气体难以容纳和运输，即使气体本身不易燃（天然气肯定是易燃的），它们在压力下也容易爆炸。
There’s no way you are doing that with natural gas. It is a . . . gas. Gases are difficult to contain and transport, and even if the gas itself is not flammable (and natural gas most assuredly is flammable), they tend to be explosive under pressure.
这种差异有一些直接的结果。
This difference has a few direct outcomes.
- 因为气体比液体燃烧得更彻底，所以天然气是世界上主要的发电燃料之一（而几乎没有人再使用石油直接发电*）。在现代发电设施中燃烧时，天然气产生的二氧化碳排放量通常仅为煤炭的一半多一点。自 2005 年以来，美国大部分 CO 2排放量的减少是因为天然气已经取代了美国电力燃料中的煤炭混合。在世界其他大部分地区，尤其是欧洲和中国，也存在着类似的流离失所现象。
- Because gases burn far more thoroughly than liquids, natural gas is one of the world’s premier electricity-generation fuels (while hardly anyone uses oil for direct power generation any longer*). When burned in a modern power facility, natural gas typically generates barely more than half the carbon dioxide emissions compared to coal. Most American reductions in CO2 emissions since 2005 have taken place because natural gas has been displacing coal in the American electricity fuel mix. Somewhat similar displacements are in play in much of the rest of the world, most notably in Europe and China.
- 人类使用的大多数天然气都是通过管道运输的，这需要生产者和消费者之间的经济联系更加紧密。因此，大多数管道天然气都是在其来源国生产的，这使得天然气的地缘政治远没有石油的地缘政治那么吸引人。当然，也有例外。俄罗斯是世界上最大的天然气出口国，这在很大程度上归功于苏联时代遗留下来的遗留基础设施。但克里姆林宫认为（并非没有道理）管道天然气产生地缘政治依赖性，并已将其天然气网络扩展到德国、意大利、土耳其和中国，以期操纵这些国家的战略政策。结果（从俄罗斯的角度来看）往往是积极的。. . 直到他们开始入侵客户的邻居。
- Most natural gas that humans use is transported via pipe, which requires far tighter economic links between producer and consumer. As such, most piped natural gas is produced in the country from which it is sourced, making the geopolitics of natural gas far less sexy writ large than the geopolitics of oil. Of course, there are exceptions. Russia is the world’s largest natural gas exporter, in large part due to legacy infrastructure left over from the Soviet era. But the Kremlin feels (not without merit) that piped natural gas generates geopolitical dependencies, and has extended its natural gas networks into Germany, Italy, Turkey, and China with an eye toward manipulating those countries’ strategic policies. Results (from the Russian viewpoint) tended to be positive . . . until they started invading their customers’ neighbors.
- 天然气可以通过船舶冷却、加压和运输，但成本高昂且需要专门的基础设施，因此仅占总量的 15% 左右。这种“液化天然气”或 LNG 的供需数学让人联想到石油。大多数液化天然气来自卡塔尔、澳大利亚、尼日利亚或美国，然后运往欧洲，尤其是东北亚。这意味着在液化天然气运输方面，生产商和消费者都应该预料到天然气供应会中断，就像石油一样。
- Natural gas can be chilled and pressurized and transported by ship, but that is expensive and requires specialized infrastructure and so is only done with about 15 percent of the total. The supply-demand math for this “liquefied natural gas,” or LNG, is reminiscent of that for oil. Most LNG comes from Qatar, Australia, Nigeria, or the United States and goes to Europe or, especially, Northeast Asia. That means when it comes to LNG shipments, producers and consumers alike should expect disruptions in natural gas supply as they will for oil.
总而言之，这三个差异并不一定为全球能源系统的这个角落预示着更光明的未来，而是一种不同的黑暗。黑暗就是这个词。石油主要用于运输燃料，因此短缺会减慢人类互动的速度。天然气主要用于发电，因此短缺意味着灯会完全熄灭。最脆弱的地区是那些最依赖来自或流经不可靠国家领土和水域的大量天然气流的地区：韩国、台湾、土耳其、中国、乌克兰、德国、奥地利、西班牙、日本、法国、波兰、和印度，大致按这个顺序。
Taken together, these three differences don’t necessarily spell out a brighter future for this corner of the global energy system, but instead a different kind of dark. And dark is the word. Oil is primarily used for transport fuel, so shortages slow human interaction to a crawl. Natural gas is primarily used for electricity generation, so shortages mean the lights literally go out. The most vulnerable locations are those most dependent upon massive natural gas flows from or through the territories and waters of countries that are less than reliable: Korea, Taiwan, Turkey, China, Ukraine, Germany, Austria, Spain, Japan, France, Poland, and India, roughly in that order.
另一个有趣的事实。天然气对那些地方至关重要。. . 缺乏它：东北亚和西欧最为明显。他们通常为这些东西支付每千立方英尺 10 美元的费用，并且必须应对易怒的生产商和易怒的过境州以及来自邻居的公然敌意。在乌克兰战争的开场白中，价格迅速突破 40 美元。
One more fun fact. Natural gas is vital to places that . . . lack it: Northeast Asia and Western Europe most notably. They regularly pay $10 per thousand cubic feet for the stuff, and must navigate tetchy producers and tetchier transit states and outright hostility from neighbors. In the Ukraine War’s opening act, prices quickly topped $40.
但在美国，天然气通常是页岩油行业开发石油的副产品。美国人经常不得不点燃这些东西，因为他们无法足够快地建立自己的分销基础设施来捕获所有东西。一旦捕获，它通常以零或接近零的价格出售到系统中，甚至增加处理和运输成本，大多数美国最终用户获得访问的成本不到世界其他地区的四分之一。改变全球体系，美国人可能对其天然气设施进行的唯一调整就是开始有目的地生产更多天然气，以便他们可以将其加工成成品销往国外。
But in the United States, natural gas is frequently a by-product of its shale sector’s oil efforts. The Americans often have to flare the stuff because they cannot build out their distribution infrastructure fast enough to capture it all. Once it is captured, it is typically sold into the system at or near zero, and even adding in processing and transport costs, most American end users get access at something less than one-quarter the cost of the rest of the world. Change the global system and the only tweak the Americans might make in their natural gas setup is to start to produce some more on purpose so that they can process it into finished products for sale abroad.
最后，地平线上出现了火灾。
Finally, there’s the fire on the horizon.
气候变化
CLIMATE CHANGE
我敢肯定，你们中的许多人都想知道我怎么能在能源一章中走这么远，而几乎没有间接提及气候变化。这并不是说我不买数学。在前世，我正在接受培训成为一名有机化学家。不同气体具有不同的吸热和反光*特性的想法是非常基础的科学，其背后有一个多世纪的证据。不，那不是问题。
I’m sure many of you are wondering how I can go this far into a chapter on energy with barely an oblique mention of climate change. It’s not that I don’t buy the math. In a previous life I was in training to be an organic chemist. The idea that different gases sport different heat-trapping and light-reflecting* characteristics is pretty basic science, with well over a century of evidence behind it. No, that’s not the problem.
问题比较多。. . 涉及。
The problem is more . . . involved.
首先，我从事地缘政治工作。地理。地理。地点。地方的研究。数十种地理因素如何相互关联以塑造文化、经济、安全和人口如何出现和相互作用。如果你告诉我整个世界将升温四度，我可以告诉你结果如何。但事实并非如此。
First, I work in geopolitics. Geo. Geography. Locations. The study of place. How dozens of geographic factors interconnect to shape how culture, economics, security, and populations emerge and interplay. If you tell me the whole world is going to heat up by four degrees I can tell you how that will play out. But that is not what is happening.
正如不同的气体具有不同的吸热和反光特性一样，不同的气候也是如此。和土地覆盖。和纬度。和高度。我们关注的不是均匀供暖，而是极度不均匀的供暖，它对陆地与水、北极与热带、城市与森林的影响更大。这不仅会影响当地温度，还会影响区域风型和全球洋流。这种不一致不仅仅为纬度、海拔、湿度、温度、土壤成分、表面角度等因素的混合增加了一个变量，使我能够解读这个星球。一切的整个地图都在改变。我们才刚刚开始解析地方过去几年的气候变化。出于本章的目的，我们将“仅”从能源生产和替代的角度处理绿色科技的技术细节和适用性，而不是气候变化的具体经济和战略结果。*由于一切都在变化，因此首先建立坚实的基线至关重要。这就是为什么我最后才处理气候变化问题，而不是开箱即用。
Just as different gases have different heat-trapping and light-reflecting characteristics, so too do different climates. And land covers. And latitudes. And altitudes. We’re not looking at an even heating, but instead an extremely uneven heating that has more of an impact on land versus water, on the Arctic versus the tropics, on cities versus forests. That affects not only local temperatures, but regional wind patterns and global ocean currents. Such inconsistency does far more than add one more variable to the mix of latitude, elevation, humidity, temperature, soil composition, surface angle, and so on that enables me to read the planet. The entire map of everything is changing. We’ve only started parsing out the localities of climate change within the past few years. For the purposes of this specific chapter, we’ll “only” be dealing with the technicalities and applicability of greentech from the angle of energy production and substitution, as opposed to the specific economic and strategic outcomes of climate change.* Since everything is changing, it is critical to first establish a solid baseline. That’s why I’m dealing with climate change last, rather than right out of the box.
其次，无论政治上或技术上发生什么，我们离石油“完蛋”还差得很远。与石油有关的主要环境问题一直是二氧化碳排放，但燃烧石油产品产生这些排放物的内燃机等技术并不是唯一使用石油的东西。石油也是满足世界大部分石化需求的基础材料。该扇区不是舍入误差。
Second, no matter what happens politically or technologically, we are nowhere near being “done” with oil. The dominant environmental concern with all things oil has been about carbon dioxide emissions, but technologies, like the internal combustion engine, that burn oil products to produce those emissions are hardly the only things that use oil. Oil is also the base material for the bulk of the world’s petrochemical needs. That sector is not a rounding error.
现代石化产品是我们今天认为“正常”的大部分产品，包括食品包装、医疗设备、洗涤剂、冷却剂、鞋类、轮胎、粘合剂、运动器材、行李箱、尿布、油漆、油墨、口香糖、润滑剂、绝缘材料、肥料、杀虫剂和除草剂，以及造纸、制药、服装、家具、建筑、玻璃、消费电子产品、汽车、家用电器和家具的第二大材料投入。石油衍生的运输燃料确实占石油使用的大部分——具体地说，将近五分之三——但石化产品占了整整五分之一。这大约相当于整个波斯湾地区通常一年的出口量。
Modern petrochemicals are responsible for the bulk of what we today consider “normal,” comprising the majority of the inputs in food packaging, medical equipment, detergents, coolants, footwear, tires, adhesives, sports equipment, luggage, diapers, paints, inks, chewing gum, lubricants, insulation, fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, and the second-largest component of material inputs in paper, pharmaceuticals, clothes, furniture, construction, glass, consumer electronics, automotive, home appliances, and furnishings. Oil-derived transport fuels do constitute the majority of oil use—nearly three-fifths, to be specific—but petrochemicals account for a full one-fifth. That’s about as much as the entire Persian Gulf exports in a typical year.
其中许多产品确实具有潜在的替代投入，但几乎在所有情况下都是替代品。. . 是天然气。超越化石燃料的可能性，或者替代品的成本超过原始输入的十倍，碳足迹超过原始输入的十倍，或者更可能是两者。即使是假设存在替代品。
Many of these products do have potential substitute inputs, but in nearly all cases that substitute . . . is natural gas. Move beyond fossil fuel possibilities and either the cost of the substitute is in excess of ten times that of the original input, the carbon footprint is in excess of ten times that of the original input, or, more likely, both. Even that assumes a substitute exists at all.
第三，绿色科技并不能使一个国家不受地缘政治的影响。它只是改变了观点。气候、温度、土地覆盖、资源位置、距离和海上阻塞点并不是唯一的地缘政治因素。纬度、海拔、湿度、温度、表面角度、风速、风可靠性、太阳辐射和季节性天气变化也是如此。正如不同的地理特征对深水航行和工业化或制造业和金融产生不同的影响一样，它们对绿色科技和传统发电的影响也不同。如果这项技术的用途因位置而异，那么就会有相对的赢家和输家。就像深水运输、工业化或石油一样。
Third, greentech does not make a country immune to geopolitics. It just shifts the view. Climate, temperature, land cover, resource location, distance, and maritime choke points are hardly the only geopolitical factors. So too are latitude, elevation, humidity, temperature, surface angle, windspeed, wind reliability, solar radiation, and seasonal weather variation. Just as different geographic features impact deepwater navigation and industrialization differently or manufacturing and finance differently, so too do they impact greentech and conventional power generation differently. And if the tech is of varying usefulness based on location, then there are relative winners and losers. Just as there are with deepwater transport or industrialization or oil.
我个人？我以前住在奥斯汀，现在住在丹佛郊外。我在两个家里都安装了太阳能系统。在炎热、阳光明媚的得克萨斯州，我在不到八年的时间里就收回了投资。在科罗拉多州生活的时间可能会更少。丹佛是美国阳光最充足的都市区，在高海拔地区没有湿度（空气也很少）可以阻挡阳光。当技术与正确的地理位置相匹配时，我绝对相信这项技术。
Me personally? I used to live in Austin and now reside just outside Denver. I’ve put up solar systems on both homes. In hot, sunny Texas I recouped my investment in under eight years. It’ll likely take less time living in Colorado. Denver is the United States’ sunniest metro area, and at high altitude there is no humidity (and very little air) to block sunlight. I’m absolutely a believer in the technology when it’s matched to the correct geography.
没有很多“正确”的地理位置。
There isn’t a lot of that “correct” geography.
世界上大部分地区的风都不是很大，阳光也不是很好。加拿大东部、北欧和中欧每年平均有九个多月处于云雾笼罩的状态，此外冬季的白昼也短得令人痛苦。没有人去佛罗里达或巴西北部玩风筝冲浪。中国东部三分之二的地区、印度的绝大部分地区以及几乎整个东南亚——拥有世界上整整一半的人口——的太阳能和风能潜力如此之小，以至于大规模的绿色科技建设将排放比它更多的碳会永远保存。西非也一样。还有北安第斯山脉。以及前苏联人口较多的地区。还有安大略省。
Most parts of the world are neither very windy nor very sunny. Eastern Canada and northern and Central Europe are cloud-bound for more than nine months of the year on average, in addition to having painfully short winter days. No one goes to Florida or northern Brazil to kiteboard. The eastern two-thirds of China, the vast bulk of India, and nearly the entirety of Southeast Asia—home to fully half the world’s population—have so little solar and wind potential that a large-scale greentech buildout would emit more carbon than it would ever save. Same for West Africa. And the northern Andes. And the more populated portions of the former Soviet Union. And Ontario.
今天的绿色科技具有环境和经济意义的区域不到人口稠密大陆陆地面积的五分之一，其中大部分远离我们的主要人口中心。想想风能的巴塔哥尼亚，或太阳能的内陆地区。不幸的事实是，目前形式的绿色科技对大多数地方的大多数人来说根本没有用——无论是减少碳排放还是在更加混乱的后秩序世界中提供能源输入的替代品。
Zones for which today’s greentech makes both environmental and economic sense comprise less than one-fifth of the land area of the populated continents, most of which is far removed from our major population centers. Think Patagonia for wind, or the Outback for solar. The unfortunate fact is that greentech in its current form simply isn’t useful for most people in most places—either to reduce carbon emissions or to provide a substitute for energy inputs in a more chaotic, post-Order world.
第四，密度问题。我住在农村地区，我的家相应地蔓延开来。我有一个 10 千瓦的太阳能系统，它覆盖了我大部分朝南和朝西的屋顶线，并产生足够的电力来满足我几乎所有的需求。但如果我住在城市里呢？更小的车顶线意味着更少的面板空间。如果我住在公寓里怎么办？我的“屋顶”将是一个共享空间，其面板需要为多个单元供电。如果我住在高层怎么办？最小的屋顶空间，很多人利用很少的面板。
Fourth, is the issue of density. I live in a rural area and my home sprawls accordingly. I’ve got a ten-kilowatt solar system, which covers the majority of my south- and west-facing roof lines and generates sufficient power for nearly all my needs. But what if I lived in a city? A smaller roofline means less room for panels. What if I lived in an apartment? My “roof” would be a shared space whose panels need to feed multiple units. What if I lived in a high-rise? Minimal roof space, lots of people drawing upon very few panels.
化石燃料非常集中，以至于它们实际上是物理形式的“能量”。相比之下，所有绿色科技都需要空间。太阳能是其中最差的：它的密度大约是传统方式供电系统的一千倍。想想美国的特大城市群，从北部的波士顿到南部的大华盛顿地区，都是人口稠密的城市。总的来说，这条线的沿海城市占美国人口的大约三分之一，但足迹很小。它们也恰好位于太阳能和风能潜力非常低的土地上。他们可以在当地产生足够的电力的想法是愚蠢的。他们需要导入它。最近的区域具有相当好的太阳能潜力（不是“好”，“相当好”）是弗吉尼亚州中南部。距离波士顿 600 英里，这很不方便，而且波士顿将排在华盛顿特区、巴尔的摩、费城、纽约市、哈特福德和普罗维登斯之后最后一口电力供应。
Fossil fuels are so concentrated that they are literally “energy” in physical form. In contrast, all greentechs require space. Solar is the worst of the bunch: it is roughly one thousand times less dense than systems powered by more conventional means. Consider America’s Megalopolis, the line of densely packed cities from Boston in the north to the Greater DC area in the south. Collectively, the coastal cities of this line comprise roughly one-third of the American population on a tiny footprint. They also happen to be positioned on patches of land with very low solar and wind potential. The idea they could generate sufficient volumes of electricity locally is asinine. They need to import it. The closest zone with reasonably good solar potential (not “good,” “reasonably good”) is south-central Virginia. That’s an inconvenient six hundred miles away from Boston, and Boston would be last in line for sips of electricity after D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City, Hartford, and Providence.
对于位于多云、静止位置的城市来说，这不仅仅是一个问题。这对世界各地的城市来说都是一个问题。必须重新评估将我们带到工业化、城市化时代的每一项技术发展，才能使今天的绿色科技发挥作用。但到目前为止，最大的挑战是城市本身的存在。根据定义，所有这些都是人口稠密的，而根据定义，绿色科技不是稠密。即使在阳光充足和多风的地方，要使这个圈子成平方，也需要大量的基础设施来弥合密集的人口模式和更加分散的绿色技术发电系统之间的差距。这种基础设施的规模和范围将是人类尚未尝试过的。另一种选择是清空城市，解开六千年的历史。让我怀疑。
It isn’t simply an issue for cities located in cloudy, still locations. It is a problem for cities everywhere. Every technological development that has brought us to our industrialized, urbanized present must be reevaluated to make today’s greentech work. But by far the biggest challenge is the very existence of cities themselves. All are by definition densely populated, while greentech by definition is not dense. Squaring that circle even in sunny and windy locations will require massive infrastructure to bridge the gap between dense population patterns and far more dispersed greentech electricity-generating systems. Such infrastructure would be on a scale and of a scope that humanity has not yet attempted. The alternative is to empty the cities and unwind six thousand years of history. Color me skeptical.
第五，即使太阳能和风能在可靠性方面与石油、天然气和煤炭相当，电网脱碳仍然是一项艰巨的任务。目前，全球 38% 的发电量来自碳排放免费，这表明我们“只”需要将好的部分大致增加三倍来取代坏的部分。错误的。水电已经在全球范围内使用了所有可用的适当地理位置。Nuclear 首先需要一场强大的公关活动来充分提升其形象。如果只有太阳能和风能发挥作用，它们将需要九倍的扩建才能完全取代化石燃料。
Fifth, even if solar and wind were equivalent technologies to oil, natural gas, and coal in terms of reliability, decarbonizing the grid would remain a mammoth task. Currently, 38 percent of global power generation is carbon free, suggesting we’d “only” need to roughly triple the good slice to displace the bad. Wrong. Hydropower has already used all available appropriate geographies globally. Nuclear would first need a helluva PR campaign to sufficiently improve its image. If only solar and wind are doing the lifting, they would need a ninefold buildout to fully displace fossil fuels.
第六，即使在绿色科技运作良好的地区，它充其量也只是部分补丁。Greentech只发电。理论上，风能和太阳能可能能够在某些特定地点取代煤炭，但任何类型的电力都无法与使用石油衍生液体燃料的现有基础设施和车辆兼容。
Sixth, even in the geographies where greentech works well, it is at best only a partial patch. Greentech only generates electricity. Wind and solar might theoretically be able to replace coal in some specific locations, but electricity of any type is not compatible with existing infrastructure and vehicles that use oil-derived liquid fuels.
这种限制自然会引发关于电动汽车作为内燃机驱动汽车的大规模替代品的讨论。这比听起来要困难得多。
Such a restriction naturally leads to discussion of electric vehicles as a wholesale replacement for those powered by internal combustion engines. Such is far more difficult than it sounds.
整个全球电力部门产生的电力与液体运输燃料产生的电力大致相当。计算一下：将所有交通工具从内燃机转为电力，需要将人类的发电能力提高一倍。同样，水力和核能也无济于事，因此太阳能和风能的九倍增长现在是二十倍。你甚至都没有完成。你现在需要绝对大量的传输能力，将风能和太阳能系统可以发电的地方连接到最终消耗电力的地方。就欧洲和中国而言，这些电力线必须跨越各大洲。您还假设一些小细节会妨碍您，例如风一直在吹，或者太阳永远不会落下，或者从利比亚沙漠到柏林或从内陆到北京的电力传输永远不会出现问题。更有可能的是，只有当我们加倍使用环保主义者所说的我们正试图从系统中剔除的能源时，采用当今技术的电动汽车才会发挥作用。
The entirety of the global electricity sector generates roughly as much power as liquid transport fuels. Run the math: switching all transport from internal combustion to electric would necessitate a doubling of humanity’s capacity to generate electricity. Again, hydro and nuclear couldn’t help, so that ninefold increase in solar and wind is now a twenty-fold increase. Nor are you even remotely done. You now need absolutely massive transmission capacity to link the locations where wind and solar systems can generate power to where that power would ultimately be consumed. In the case of Europe and China, those power lines have to jump continents. You’re also assuming minor little details break your way, such as the wind always blowing or the sun never setting or there never being hiccups in transmitting power from the Libyan desert to Berlin or the Outback to Beijing. More likely, EVs with today’s technology will work only if we double down on the very energy sources that environmentalists say we’re trying to cut out of the system.
以我不那么谦虚的观点，我们需要首先解决首要问题：我们需要在扩展电网之前先将其绿化。不幸的是，这项努力的步伐非常缓慢：从 2014 年太阳能热潮开始到 2020 年，太阳能仅增加到总能源使用量的 1.5%。
In my not so humble opinion, we need to tackle first things first: we need to green the grid before we expand it. And unfortunately, the pace of that effort is painfully slow: From 2014, when the solar boom began, until 2020, solar has only increased to become 1.5 percent of total energy use.
第七，就技术挑战和成本而言，潜在转换的实际方面超出了艰巨的范围，我不是在谈论安装足够的太阳能电池板和风力涡轮机以产生 43,000 太瓦时电力的相对简单的任务，大致是 2010 年到 2021 年绿色科技建设总量的 70 倍。
Seventh, the practical aspects of a potential switchover are beyond Herculean, both in terms of technical challenges and cost, and I am not talking about the relatively simple task of installing enough solar panels and wind turbines to generate 43,000 terawatt-hours of electricity, roughly seventy times the total greentech buildout of 2010 through 2021.
- 使现代世界运转的部分原因是按需供电。这需要一种称为可调度性的东西：发电厂可以上下调节其功率输出以满足需求的想法。风能和太阳能不仅不能做到这一点；它们也是间歇性的。功率水平根据最反复无常的力量而变化：天气。硬件升级可以防止这种浪涌交替地使工业和住宅用户短路或断电，但这不是免费的。
- Part of what makes the modern world work is on-demand electricity. This requires something called dispatchability: the idea that a power plant can ramp its power output up and down to match demand. Not only can wind and solar not do this; they are also intermittent. Power levels vary based on that most mercurial of forces: the weather. Hardware upgrades can prevent such surges from alternatively shorting out or browning out industrial and residential customers, but that’s not free.
- 可调度性如此有吸引力的部分原因是正常电力需求有高峰和低谷。具体来说，在大多数地区，电力需求高峰期在下午 6 点到晚上 10 点之间，冬季的需求率更高。然而，太阳能供应高峰期在上午 11 点到下午 3 点之间，夏季供应量更高。而这还没有考虑到同一块面板会根据位置产生不同的电量。我的面板在高地在低迷的多伦多，科罗拉多州的电力还不到五分之一。再多的钱也无法让我们忽视这个小小的地理问题。
- Part of what makes dispatchability so attractive is that there are peaks and troughs in normal electricity demand. Specifically, in most locations peak electricity demand is between 6 p.m. and 10 p.m., with higher demand rates in the winter. However, peak solar supply is between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m., with higher supply profiles in the summer. And that’s before considering that the same panel will generate different amounts of power based on location. My panels in the highlands of Colorado would spit out less than one-fifth the power in the doldrums of Toronto. No amount of money enables us to ignore this little geographic problem.
- 不像煤炭或天然气可以前置，风吹到哪里风就吹到哪里，阳光照到哪里就晒到哪里。任何绿色科技产生的电力都必须连接到可以使用的地方。这也不是免费的，而且通常会导致输送电力的成本翻倍（或更多）（具体细节因电力的来源、消耗地点、连接基础设施的性质、必须跨越什么样的政治边界，等等）。难怪 95% 的人类从不到 50 英里以外的发电厂获取电力。
- Unlike coal or natural gas, which can be prepositioned, the wind blows where the wind blows and the sun shines where the sun shines. Any greentech-generated electricity must then be wired to where it can be used. This is also not free, and often results in the doubling (or more) of the cost of the delivered power (the details vary massively based on where the power is coming from, where it will be consumed, the nature of the connecting infrastructure, what sort of political borders must be crossed, etc.). It’s no wonder fully 95 percent of humanity sources its electricity from power plants less than fifty miles away.
- 解决此类问题需要并联电源系统。考虑到 2022 年绿色科技的现状，在大多数情况下，并联系统是一种无聊的传统系统，要么使用天然气，要么使用煤炭。让我强调一下：今天的绿色科技在大多数地方都非常不可靠，以至于那些尝试绿色科技的地方别无选择，只能维持一个完整的传统系统来满足他们的总高峰需求——全额成本。
- Addressing such issues requires a parallel power system. With the status of greentech technology in 2022, in most cases that parallel system is a boring, conventional system that runs on either natural gas or coal. Let me underline that: greentech today is so unreliable in most locations that those localities that do attempt greentech have no choice but to maintain a full conventional system for their total peak demand—at full cost.
目前形式的绿色科技根本无法将化石燃料需求削减十几个百分点左右，即使是这种“成就”也只有在相当适合它的地区才有可能。一些具有良好绿色技术潜力的地方试图用绿色技术取代一半的现有传统发电，但围绕电网容量、间歇性和输电问题的解决导致电价翻了两番。*
Greentech in its current form simply isn’t able to shave more than a dozen or so percentage points off fossil fuel demand, and even this “achievement” is only possible within geographies fairly perfect for it. A few places with good greentech potential have attempted to replace half of their preexisting conventional power generation with greentech, but working around issues of grid capacity and intermittency and transmission results in a quadrupling of power prices.*
也就是说，有一种补充技术可能——强调“可能”这个词——能够解决这些问题：电池。这个想法是绿色科技产生的电力可以储存在电池中，直到需要的时候。间歇性？可调度性？供需不匹配？都解决了！在某些情况下甚至可以缩短传输距离。
That said, there is a complementary technology out there that might—emphasis on the word “might”—be able to square these circles: batteries. The idea is that greentech-generated power can be stored in batteries until such time as it is needed. Intermittency? Dispatchability? Supply-demand mismatches? All solved! Even transmission distances can be shortened in some cases.
不幸的是，在理论上行之有效的方法在实践中面临着一些问题。首先是供应链。正如石油的生产是集中的一样，当今最好的电池化学的主要原料：锂也是如此。就像石油需要提炼成可用产品一样，原始锂也必须加工成精矿，提炼成金属，然后制成电池组件。今天的锂供应链需要畅通无阻地进入澳大利亚、智利、中国和日本。这比石油简单一点，但也没有那么简单。如果东亚发生任何大事——整个东亚都将发生大事——电池增值系统的大部分将需要在其他地方重建。这需要时间。还有钱。很多。特别是如果目标是大规模应用锂电池技术。
Unfortunately, what works beautifully in theory faces a couple of problems in practice. The first is supply chains. Just as oil’s production is concentrated, so too is the primary input for the best battery chemistry of the day: lithium. And just as oil needs to be refined into usable products, raw lithium must be processed into concentrate, refined into metals, and then built into battery assemblies. Today’s lithium supply chains require unimpeded access to Australia, Chile, China, and Japan. That’s a bit simpler than oil, but not by all that much. Should anything happen to East Asia writ large—and all of East Asia is due for a great deal of happening—the bulk of the value-added system for batteries will need to be rebuilt elsewhere. That will take time. And money. A lot of it. Especially if the goal is to apply lithium battery tech at scale.
该规模是第二个问题。锂电池很贵。它们是普通智能手机中第二或第三昂贵的组件，而且电池只能存储几瓦时。它们的成本和重量是大多数电动汽车的四分之三以上，而且这种电池只能存储几千瓦时。
That scale is the second problem. Lithium batteries are expensive. They are the second- or third-most-expensive component in the average smartphone, and that’s a battery that stores but a few watt-hours. They comprise in excess of three-quarters the cost and weight of most electric vehicles, and that’s a battery that stores but a few kilowatt-hours.
城市电网电池需要兆瓦日。实现有意义的绿色科技电力存储需要电网级电池系统，该系统可以存储至少四个小时的电力，以满足日常高需求时段的大部分时间。假设自 1990 年以来电池领域的技术进步持续到 2026 年，一个四小时的锂电网存储系统的成本将约为每兆瓦时 240 美元，或者是标准综合成本的六倍——循环天然气厂，这是目前美国最常见的发电资产。重要说明：6 倍的数字不包括实际充电的发电资产的成本电池，也不是将电力输送到电池的传输资产。
City-grid batteries require megawatt-days. Achieving meaningful greentech power storage would require grid-level battery systems that could store a minimum of four hours of power to cover the bulk of that daily high-demand period. Assuming that the technological improvements in the world of batteries that have unfolded since 1990 continue into 2026, the cost of a four-hour lithium grid storage system will be about $240 per megawatt-hour of capacity, or six times that of the standard combined-cycle natural gas plant, which is currently the most common electricity-generating asset in the United States. Important note: that 6x figure does not include the cost of the electricity-generating asset that actually charges the battery, nor the transmission asset to get the electricity to the battery.
截至 2021 年，美国的发电装机容量为 1,100 吉瓦，但蓄电容量仅为 23.2 吉瓦。在这 23.2 吉瓦的电力中，大约 70% 是所谓的“抽水蓄能”，本质上是利用多余的发电量将水抽上山，然后让这些水顺着河道流下来，根据需要为发电机提供动力。其他 30% 的大部分是位于人们家中的某种存储容量。只有 0.73 吉瓦的存储实际上是以电池的形式存在的。最致力于绿色未来意识形态的美国州是加利福尼亚州。整个状态只有足够的总存储——不是电池存储，总存储——一分钟的权力。洛杉矶是美国大都市区，其安装网格存储的计划最为积极，预计要到 20 45日才能达到一小时的总存储容量。
As of 2021, the United States had 1,100 gigawatts of installed electricity-generation capacity, but only 23.2 gigawatts of electricity storage. Roughly 70 percent of that 23.2 gigawatts is something called “pumped storage,” in essence using excess generated power to pump water uphill, and then allowing that water to flow down a watercourse to power a generator as needed. Most of the other 30 percent is some sort of storage capacity located in people’s homes. Only 0.73 gigawatts of storage is actually in the form of batteries. The American state that is most committed to the ideology of a green future is California. The state as a whole has but enough total storage—not battery storage, total storage—for one minute of power. Los Angeles, the American metropolitan area with the most aggressive plan for installing grid storage, doesn’t anticipate reaching one hour of total storage capacity until 2045.
请记住，对于洛杉矶当前的电力系统来说，这是一个小时的存储时间——而不是实现汽车和轻型卡车普遍采用电动汽车的梦想所需的两倍。
Remember, that’s one hour of storage for LA’s current electricity system—not the doubling that would be required to realize the dream of universal EV adoption for cars and light trucks.
这神奇的四个小时也不过是漫长而曲折的道路上的第一步。真正向碳中和电力系统的转变需要的容量不是数小时，而是数月的电力供应，以适应不那么多风或晴天的季节。我们并不了解能源世界的一切，但我们可以肯定地知道，整个地球上没有足够的锂矿来让像美国这样的富裕国家实现这样的目标，更不用说世界了。*
Nor would that magical four hours be anything more than the first step on a long and tortuous road. A true shift to a carbon-neutral power system would require the capacity to camel not hours, but months of electricity for the seasons that are not as windy or sunny. We don’t know everything about the world of energy, but we know for certain that there is not enough lithium ore on the entire planet to enable a rich country like the United States to achieve such a goal, much less the world writ large.*
第八，有一个很少讨论的财务问题可能很快就会使整个讨论变得毫无意义。
Eighth, there is a little-discussed financial issue that might soon make this entire discussion moot.
在拥有良好太阳能或风能资源的地方，大多数当前价格评估表明，绿色科技与传统技术的燃料、维护和安装的综合生命周期成本大致相等。从财务的角度来看，主要区别在于必须投入资金的时间。传统能源整个生命周期的总成本中，约有五分之一用于土地征用和设施建设，其余部分在数十年内用于燃料采购和设施维护。相比之下，对于绿色科技，几乎所有成本都是预付的，陆上风力涡轮机预付了三分之二。毕竟，燃料成本为零。
In places with good solar or wind resources, most current price assessments suggest that the combined lifetime cost of fuel, maintenance, and installation for greentech versus conventional is more or less equal. From a financial point of view, the primary difference is when capital must be committed. About one-fifth of the total costs for the entire life span of a conventional power are spent up front on land acquisition and facility construction, with the rest dribbled out over decades for fuel purchase and facility maintenance. In contrast, for greentech nearly the entire cost is up front, two-thirds up front in the case of onshore wind turbines. After all, fuel costs are zero.
在资本丰富的晚期秩序世界中，这是一个脚注，而且不是特别重要的脚注。在资金便宜的情况下预先为 25 年的电费账单融资并没有错。但在资本匮乏的混乱世界中，这很可能就是一切。如果投资资本变得更难获得或借贷成本上升，所有这些前期投资就会从容易进行的风险降低到令人不满意的风险和昂贵。在那个世界里，传统系统的安装成本低得多更有意义。
In the capital-rich world of the late Order, this is a footnote, and not a particularly important one at that. There is nothing wrong with financing twenty-five years of power bills up front when capital is cheap. But in the capital-poor world of the Disorder, this could well be everything. Should investment capital become harder to source or borrowing costs go up, all such up-front investments degrade from an easy carry to unsatisfactorily risky and expensive. In that world, the far lower installation costs of conventional systems make a great deal more sense.
当前形式的绿色科技还不够成熟或不够便宜，无法为大多数地区的大多数人带来积极影响。它在很大程度上仅限于拥有丰富资本供应的发达国家，这些国家恰好拥有大量人口中心，非常靠近阳光充足或多风的地方。美国西南部看起来很棒，美国大平原、澳大利亚和北海沿岸也是如此。
Greentech in its current form simply isn’t mature enough or cheap enough to move the needle for most peoples in most locations. It is largely limited to developed countries with rich capital supplies who just coincidentally happen to have large population centers fairly close to sunny or windy locations. The southwest quarter of the United States looks great, as do the American Great Plains, Australia, and the coasts of the North Sea.
几乎所有其他地区仍将依赖更传统的燃料来满足其绝大多数能源需求。从温室气体排放的角度来看，这比听起来要糟糕得多，因为这些地区中的绝大多数也将无法继续使用国际贸易的石油和天然气。如果他们无法获得石油或天然气，而且他们的地理位置无法充分利用太阳能和风能，他们将有一个简单的决定。选项 A 是放弃过去两个世纪使人类进步的产品，遭受产品获取和粮食生产的灾难性减少，引发生活水平和人口水平的大幅下调。去没有电。去工业化。到非文明化。
Nearly all other locations will remain dependent upon more traditional fuels for the vast majority of their energy needs. This is far worse than it sounds from the point of view of greenhouse gas emissions because the vast majority of these locations will not be able to retain access to internationally traded oil and natural gas, either. If they cannot source oil or natural gas and their geographies do not enable sufficient use of solar and wind, they will have a simple decision to make. Option A is to do without the products that have enabled humanity to advance for the past two centuries, to suffer catastrophic reductions in product access and food production, triggering massive downward revisions in standards of living and population. To go without electricity. To deindustrialize. To decivilize.
或者——选项 B——使用几乎所有国家都在当地拥有的一种燃料来源：煤炭。许多特别倒霉的人会被一种叫做褐煤的东西困住，这是一种几乎不符合煤炭燃料条件的燃料，按重量通常只有五分之一的水，是迄今为止使用的效率最低、最脏的燃料。德国今天已经使用褐煤作为其主要的动力输入燃料，因为绿色技术非常不适用于德国的地理环境，然而德国人出于环境原因已经关闭了大多数其他发电选择。*
Or—Option B—to use the one fuel source that nearly all countries have locally: coal. Many particularly unlucky people will be stuck with something called lignite, a barely-qualifies-as-coal fuel that is typically one-fifth water by weight and is by far the least efficient and dirtiest fuel in use today. Germany already today uses lignite as its primary power input fuel because greentech is so woefully unapplicable to the German geography, and yet the Germans—for environmental reasons—have shut down most of their other power-generation options.*
作为一个星球，我们完全有能力在遭受大规模经济崩溃的同时大幅增加我们的碳排放量。
As a planet, we are perfectly capable of suffering broad-scale economic collapse and vastly increasing our carbon emissions at the same time.
为未来加油
Fueling the Future
我们正在进入这样一个世界，波斯湾和前苏联边境地区的能源供应将受到竞争激烈的战略环境的影响。即使这些地区的问题都没有爆发为正式战争，它们的不稳定和不安全也几乎可以保证石油和天然气的生产和流动将中断多年。或者更有可能，几十年。即便如此，也假设东亚没有战略竞争，东南亚或非洲沿海也没有海盗行为（无论是国家还是其他国家）。可靠、廉价的石油运输的日子即将结束。
We’re slouching into a world where energy supplies out of both the Persian Gulf and the borderlands of the former Soviet Union will be subject to highly contested strategic environments. Even if none of the regions’ issues erupt into formal wars, their instability and insecurity all but guarantees that oil and natural gas production and flows will be disrupted for years. Or more likely, decades. Even that assumes no strategic competition in East Asia, and no piracy—state or otherwise—along the coasts of Southeast Asia or Africa. The days of reliable, inexpensive oil shipments are coming to an inglorious end.
它会比听起来更糟糕，而且不仅仅是在高层次上，这种情况会发生在那个国家，而是在个人层面上。
It will be worse than it sounds, and not just at the high-level, this-will-happen-to-that-country sort of way, but instead deeply personally.
从中国加入全球体系到冷战结束，全球石油总需求自 1980 年以来翻了一番——这主要是由于新参与者开始了他们在工业化和城市化道路上的旅程。大多数人的现代工业化城市生活方式都需要石油，而随着美国人失去兴趣，石油将不会存在. 运输环节将萎缩，这将影响从制造供应链的连贯性到食品分配的方方面面。许多电力系统会因缺乏燃料而失效。如果没有充足的能源，城市化的物质集中——使我们能够过上相对低碳、高附加值的生活——是不可能的。全球化的终结可能预示着我们所知道的世界的终结，但全球能源的终结预示着我们所知道的生活的终结。
Between the entrance of China into the global system and the end of the Cold War, total global oil demand has doubled since 1980—mostly due to new players starting their journeys down the roads of industrialization and urbanization. The modern, industrial, urban lifestyles of most of the human population require oil, and with the Americans having lost interest, that oil will not be there. Transport links will shrivel, which will impact everything from the coherence of manufacturing supply chains to food distribution. Many electricity systems will fail due to lack of fuel. The physical concentrations of urbanization—what enables us to live relatively low-carbon-impact, high-value-added lives—are simply not possible without ample energy. The end of globalization may herald the end of the world we know, but the end of global energy heralds the end of the lives we know.
面临最严重短缺的地区是那些处于脆弱供应线末端的主要消费者：东北亚和中欧，德国、韩国和中国目前面临最严重的短缺威胁，因为它们都没有邻近的石油或天然气来源，也没有冒险去保护别人的军事能力。也会有电力问题。这三个国家都使用核能、天然气和煤炭的混合物来满足大部分电力需求，所有这些都基于进口燃料。其中，中国是最脆弱的。三十年的增长使该国的电力系统紧张；这个国家没有多余的产能——它运行所有无论输入燃料如何，它的发电量都会保持平稳——因此任何输入短缺都至少会导致大规模轮流停电。这已经发生了。2021 年底，随着中国在 COVID 和更严格的环境规则的双重影响下苦苦挣扎，占全国 GDP 三分之一的地区面临轮流停电和限电。
The locations facing the greatest shortages are those major consumers at the very end of those vulnerable supply lines: Northeast Asia and Central Europe, with Germany, Korea, and China by far facing the greatest threats, as none have proximate oil or natural gas sourcing, nor the military capacity to venture out to secure someone else’s. There will be electricity problems as well. All three use a mix of nuclear, natural gas, and coal for the vast bulk of their electricity needs, all based upon imported fuel. Of these, China is by far the most vulnerable. Three decades of growth has strained the country’s electricity system; the country has no spare capacity—it runs all of its power generation flat-out regardless of the input fuel—so any input shortage would at a minimum lead to large-scale rotating blackouts. It’s already happened. As China struggled in late 2021 with the dual impacts of COVID and the stricter environmental rules, regions responsible for one-third of the country’s GDP faced rolling blackouts and electricity rationing.
对于拥有更多资源的国家来说，前景更为光明，但仍然存在许多问题。像英国、法国、日本和印度这样的国家确实拥有足以让它们走出去并自己获取资源的军事实力和地理位置，但它们都将面临一个可怕的价格环境。他们的解决方案很明显：对供应系统建立一定程度的新帝国主义控制，以将所有供应都保留在内部，并使自己摆脱全球定价的庸俗变迁，这种定价要么是侮辱性的昂贵，要么是无礼的疯狂。这对这些新的原始帝国来说很好，但这样的行动会从系统的其余部分移除更多的石油。
For the countries with more means, the picture is brighter, but there are still loads of problems. Countries like the United Kingdom, France, Japan, and India do have the military wherewithal and geographic position that will enable them to go out and secure resources themselves, but all will face a price environment of terrifying proportions. Their solution is obvious: establish a degree of neo-imperial control over a supply system to keep all supplies in-house and divorce themselves from the vulgar vicissitudes of global pricing that is alternatively insultingly expensive and erratically insane. That’s great for these new proto-empires, but such actions would remove even more oil from the rest of the system.
具有讽刺意味的是，美国是少数几个不仅不会面临长期能源危机，而且还可以大规模尝试石油和天然气替代品的国家之一。它是最靠近赤道的发达国家，因此在大规模安装太阳能方面排名世界第二（澳大利亚遥遥领先）。它在大平原拥有大片被风吹拂的土地，这使它拥有世界上最好的风能资源。在石油需求方面，美国人甚至还有一张王牌：大多数页岩油井的副产品之一是源源不断的天然气。美国人，而且几乎只有美国人，可以在他们的石化系统中使用天然气代替石油。加入相对稳健的资本澳大利亚和智利的锂矿床的结构和安全访问，美国人甚至可以尝试使用当前技术推出电池系统和电动汽车，如果他们愿意的话。
The ironic bottom line is that the United States is one of only a handful of countries that not only will not face a protracted energy crisis, but can also attempt oil and natural gas substitutes at scale. It is the developed country closest to the equator, granting it the world’s second-best opportunities for mass solar installations (Australia is far away in the top spot). It has huge swaths of windswept lands in the Great Plains, granting it the world’s best wind resources. The Americans even have an ace in the hole in terms of their oil demand: One of the by-products from most shale oil wells is a steady flow of natural gas. The Americans, and pretty much only the Americans, can use that natural gas in lieu of oil in their petrochemical systems. Add in a relatively stable and robust capital structure and secure access to lithium deposits in Australia and Chile, and the Americans can even attempt battery systems and EV rollouts with current technologies, should they so choose.
对于我们迄今为止讨论的所有主题——交通、金融和能源——美国是幸运的国家。运气很深，植根于地理，这意味着它也可以应用于其他情况。因为如果您认为美国人在前三个主题上取得了成功，请等到您看到美国人的运气对接下来的三个主题的影响。
For all the topics we’ve addressed so far—transport, finance, and energy—the United States is the lucky country. That luck is deep, rooted in geography, which means it can be applied to other situations as well. For if you think the Americans have it made on these first three topics, just wait until you see the impact of the Americans’ luck upon the next three.
拆解历史
Disassembling History
我对本章没有一个时髦的介绍，因为我们赖以制造技术和世界运作的材料有点嵌入了我们时代的名称：石器时代。青铜时代。铁器时代。许多人合理地说，21 世纪初完全是硅时代的一部分。
I don’t have a snazzy introduction to this chapter because the materials we rely upon to make our technology and our world work are kinda sorta embedded in the names of our eras: The Stone Age. The Bronze Age. The Iron Age. Many, reasonably, say the early twenty-first century is fully part of the Silicon Age.
不想把它说得太细，但如果你在铁器时代缺铁，那么历史往往会忘记你。我想你知道我要去哪里了。无论是石油还是铜，要么你有，你能得到，要么你没有。如果你不这样做，你就不能玩。
Not to put too fine a point on it, but if you lack iron in the Iron Age, then history tends to forget about you. I think you see where I’m going with this. Whether oil or copper, either you have it, you can get it, or you don’t. And if you don’t, you do not get to play.
可能不太明显的是，近几十年来我们对各种工业材料的贸易和依赖已经变得多方面。
What might not be so obvious is just how multifaceted our trade in and dependency upon the various industrial materials have become in recent decades.
同样，最好拨回开头。
Again, it’s best to dial back to the beginning.
早期关于材料的冲突与其说是帝国的或民族的，不如说是帝国或国家可言。相反，这种斗争是关于氏族、部落和家庭的。也没有什么可争吵的。在石器时代，你不必走那么远才能找到。. . 石头。当然，有些岩石更适合切割或箭头——我想到的是黑曜石——但交通不便限制了每个人的触及范围。你使用了你能接触到的东西，这塑造了你的文化。与岩石相比，我们更有可能为食物（以及可以可靠地种植食物的土地）而战。
Early conflicts over materials were not so much imperial or national, as there were no empires or nations to speak of. Instead, such struggles were about clan, tribe, and family. There also wasn’t a lot to fight over. In the Stone Age it wasn’t like you had to go that far to find . . . stone. Sure, there were certain rocks that were better for cutting or arrowheads—obsidian comes to mind—but the tyranny of transport limited everyone’s reach. You used what you had access to and that shaped your culture. We were far more likely to fight over food (and lands that could grow it reliably) than rocks.
随着石器时代让位给青铜器时代，数学发生了微妙的变化。埃及——（以）著名的——除了小麦、大麦、石头、沙子、芦苇、一些铜和几乎取之不尽的劳动力供应外，一无所有。每个派出的贸易代表团，每场战争，都是为了获取不在该清单上的资源。埃及人最需要的物品是锻造青铜所需的砷和/或锡。美索不达米亚的城邦同样盛产小麦和大麦，但物质匮乏，因此经常发生战争和与彼此以及他们的上游和山上邻居进行交易，以获取相当于 iPhone 的古老产品。*
As the age of Stone gave way to the age of Bronze, the math subtly shifted. Egypt—(in)famously—had nothing but wheat, barley, stones, sand, reeds, some copper, and a near-bottomless supply of labor. Every trade delegation sent, every war fought, was about accessing resources not on that list. The top items the Egyptians needed were the arsenic and/or tin required to forge bronze. The Mesopotamian city-states were similarly wheat- and barley-rich and material-poor, and so regularly warred and traded with one another and their upstream and up-mountain neighbors to access the ancient equivalent of iPhones.*
快进到下一个时代——铁的时代——数学再次收紧。铜作为一种材料几乎是独一无二的，因为它是少数可以偶尔以其天然金属形式被发现的材料之一。铁永远不会发生这种情况。铁也没有铜那么普遍。但是，这并非闻所未闻，特别是因为我们现在谈论的是公元前 800 年。帝国时代如火如荼，所以当时的统治系统有能力触及各种各样的源矿。与其面临材料短缺，不如担心技能短缺。铁矿石本身是无用的，将矿石变成真正的铁的艺术需要数百名知道自己在做什么的人。大多数政府更有可能发动袭击来绑架铁匠，而不是保护铁矿石或铜矿。
Fast-forward to the next age—that of Iron—and the math tightened up again. Copper was nearly unique as a material in that it is one of the few materials that on occasion can be found lying about in its natural, metal form. That never happens with iron. Nor was iron nearly as common as copper. But still, it wasn’t exactly unheard-of, particularly since we’re now talking about the age of 800 BCE on. The Age of Empires was in full swing, so the governing systems of the day had the ability to reach a wide variety of source mines. Instead of facing materials shortages, the primary concern was skill shortages. Iron ore on its own is useless, and the art of turning the ore into actual iron required hundreds of someones who knew what they were doing. Most governments were more likely to launch attacks to abduct blacksmiths than to secure iron ore or copper mines.
从技术的角度来看，在石器时代、青铜器时代和铁器时代见证的缓慢、渐进的进步发现自己被公元 476 年罗马帝国的没落粗鲁地打断了，伊斯兰圣战622-750，最重要的是，六世纪到十一世纪欧洲黑暗时代的文化和技术熄火。三者之间的粗略重叠肯定不利于技术保存，更不用说进步了。
From a technological point of view, things puttered on for another millennium before the slow, incremental progress witnessed under the technological Ages of Stone, Bronze, and Iron found itself rudely interrupted by the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 CE, the Islamic jihad of 622–750, and above all, the cultural and technological flameouts of the European Dark Ages during the sixth through eleventh centuries. The rough overlap among the three certainly was not conducive to technological preservation, much less advancement.
某种意义上的救赎以最离奇的形式出现：大规模屠杀。在 1345–46 年，蒙古人的金帐汗国围攻了几个克里米亚要塞城市，这是他们刻板印象中的一种做法，即按我们的方式行事，否则我们将杀死你们所有人，哦，是的，我们- 也想交易一些茶叶军事活动。一旦蒙古人开始用弹射器向卡法市发射尸体，一群热那亚商人决定不再留下来，看看战斗将如何结束。他们逃跑了——随便——海上（尽管在从一个突然间任何假装道德都消失了的城市接收最后一批奴隶之前）。
Salvation, of a sort, came in the most bizarre of forms: mass carnage. In 1345–46 the Mongols’ Golden Horde was laying siege to several Crimean fortress-cities in one of their stereotypical do-things-our-way-or-we-will-kill-you-all-and-oh-yeah-we-want-to-trade-too-how-about-some-tea military campaigns. Once the Mongols started catapult-launching corpses into the city of Kaffa, a group of Genoese traders decided not to stick around and see how the fight would end. They fled—casually—by sea (although not before picking up one final shipment of slaves from a city where suddenly any pretense of morality had evaporated).
在整个人类历史上，热那亚的船只上都有老鼠，这在所有船只上都很常见。热那亚人不知道，这些老鼠携带着腺鼠疫。热那亚人的第一站是君士坦丁堡，即当时的新加坡。五年之内，几乎整个欧洲、俄罗斯和北非世界都在与该地区历史上最严重的流行病作斗争。最终，该地区三分之一的人口被消灭，人口密度在 150 年内没有恢复。*
As has been common on all ships for the entirety of human history, the Genoese vessels had rats. Unknown to the Genoese, those rats were carrying bubonic plague. The Genoese’s first stop was Constantinople, the Singapore of the day. Within five years, nearly all of the European, Russian, and North African world was battling the worst epidemic in regional history. Ultimately, one-third of the region’s population was wiped out, with population densities not restored for 150 years.*
任何人，如果没有瘟疫，我们很可能仍然停留在黑暗时代。
Anywho, without the Plague, we may well have remained stuck in the Dark Ages.
大规模死亡事件的有趣之处：对于那些没有死去的人来说，生命。. . 继续。仍然需要种植粮食，锤出马蹄铁，建造谷仓，切割石头。即使一场瘟疫不分青红皂白地消灭了谁，其后这种或那种技能组合也会存在地区差异。黑死病解除后，许多地方都缺乏足够数量的织工、木匠或瓦匠。在每种短缺情况下，都会发生两件事。
Funny thing about mass death events: For those who don’t die, life . . . continues. Food still needs to be grown, horseshoes hammered out, barns erected, stone cut. Even if a plague is indiscriminate in whom it eliminates, in the aftermath there will be regional disparities for this or that skill set. Once the Black Death lifted, many locations lacked a sufficient number of weavers, or carpenters, or bricklayers. In every case of shortage, two things happened.
首先，供求关系：相关行业的实得工资有所增加，为我们现代熟练劳动力的概念奠定了基础。其次，扩大此类技能输出的需要导致当地工人、行会和统治者都提高了生产力。有些人通过培训新工人来做到这一点。有些是通过开发新技术。有些是通过引进阿拉伯人在罗马沦陷后保存下来的被遗忘已久的知识。*
First, supply and demand: those in the relevant profession experienced an increase in take-home pay, setting the stage for our modern concept of skilled labor. Second, the need to expand the output of such skill sets led local workers, guilds, and rulers alike to increase productivity. Some did this by training new workers. Some by developing new techniques. Some by importing the long-forgotten knowledge preserved by the Arabs in the aftermath of Rome’s fall.*
到 15 世纪，这种过程和学习的进步已经达到了我们现在公认的文艺复兴时期的临界点。加强社会思想、文化、数学和科学的进步，不仅在一千年的黑暗之后重新启动技术发展，而且还让我们走上了另一个技术时代的道路：工业时代。在对自然界的知识和理解的广泛扩展的众多成果中，稳步改进了从这种或那种矿石中检测、分离和纯化这种或那种材料的方法。
By the fifteenth century, such advances in process and learning had reached the critical mass we now recognize as the Renaissance. Reinforcing advances in social thought, culture, mathematics, and science culminated not simply in restarting technological development after a millennium of Dark, but also started us down the path to another technological age: the Industrial. Among the many outcomes of the broad-based expansions in knowledge and understanding of the natural world were steadily improving methods to detect, isolate, and purify this or that material from this or that ore.
回溯几十个世纪，我们仅限于铜、铅、金、银、锡、砷、铁和锌。随着化学和物理规则的编纂，我们将该清单扩大到包括钴、铂、镍、锰、钨、铀、钛、铬、钽、钯、钠、碘、锂、硅、铝、钍、氦, 和霓虹灯。一旦我们知道了这些材料，并知道如何将它们从岩石中分离出来，并知道如何充分净化它们以供使用使用，我们开发了将它们放回一起并在受控环境下混合搭配的能力。因此，现在我们拥有一切，从火焰喷射器到暴露在所述火焰喷射器下也不会熔化的钢材，再到铜、金和硅的网格，可以在一只手上放置比中世纪世界的整个知识分子更多的脑力，再到派对气球。
Going back dozens of centuries, we had been limited to copper, lead, gold, silver, tin, arsenic, iron, and zinc. With the codification of the rules of chemistry and physics, we expanded that list to include cobalt, platinum, nickel, manganese, tungsten, uranium, titanium, chromium, tantalum, palladium, sodium, iodine, lithium, silicon, aluminum, thorium, helium, and neon. Once we knew of these materials, and knew how to separate them from rock, and knew how to purify them sufficiently for use, we developed the ability to put them back together and mix-andmatch them under controlled circumstances. Consequently, now we have everything from flamethrowers to steel that won’t melt if exposed to said flamethrowers, to meshes of copper and gold and silicon that can place more brainpower in one hand than the entire intelligentsia of the medieval world, to party balloons.
过去的教训，未来的教训
LESSONS FROM THE PAST, LESSONS FOR THE FUTURE
每种材料都有自己的用途。每一种材料与其他材料结合起来都有更多的用途。有些是离散的。有些允许替换。但它们都有一个简单的特征。无论是用于建筑、战争、城市化还是制造业，都是工业时代的产物。它们需要工业时代的技术来生产、运输、提炼、提纯、合金化，并重新组合成增值产品。如果工业技术集的可持续性或范围发生任何变化，它们都会消失，并带走它们的所有好处。
Every material has its own use. Every material combined with others has more uses. Some are discrete. Some allow substitution. But all share a simple characteristic. Whether used in construction or war or urbanization or manufacturing, all are children of the Industrial Age. They require Industrial Age technologies to be produced, shipped, refined, purified, alloyed, and rearranged into value-added products. Should anything happen to the sustainability or reach of the industrial technology set, all of them will simply fade away—and take all their benefits with them.
我们以前见过这个。多次。
We have seen this before. Many times.
世界上许多过去的帝国都发起了特定的军事行动来保护这种或那种材料，而其他帝国则利用他们对这种或那种材料的控制来实现突破，并成为超出其地理通常允许范围的东西。
Many of the world’s past empires launched specific military campaigns to secure this or that material, while others leveraged their control of this or that material to achieve breakthrough and become something more than their geographies would normally allow.
由于来自单一盐矿的收入（盐是 1300 年代保存大量肉类或鱼类的唯一可靠方法），波兰成为欧洲头号强国。西班牙凭借波托西银矿的经验，轻松将其作为全球超级大国的地位延长了一个世纪。在 1800 年代后期，智利与秘鲁和玻利维亚就阿塔卡马沙漠及其丰富的铜、银和硝酸盐（早期工业火药的关键成分）矿藏发生战争。英国养成了随时随地航行的坏习惯，攻击任何拥有英国人可能喜欢的东西的人。英国人特别喜欢占领入口点，例如曼哈顿、新加坡、苏伊士运河、冈比亚或伊洛瓦底江，所有这些使他们能够削减有趣的不易腐烂商品的区域贸易。
Poland became Europe’s premier power due to the income from a single salt mine (salt being the only reliable method of the 1300s for preserving large amounts of meat or fish). Spain’s experience with the Potosi silver mine easily extended its tenure as the global superpower for a century. In the late 1800s, Chile warred with Peru and Bolivia over the Atacama Desert and its rich deposits of copper, silver, and nitrates (a key component in early-industrial gunpowder). Britain made a bad habit of sailing anywhere at any time to attack anyone who had anything the Brits might fancy. The Brits were particularly fond of seizing access points like Manhattan or Singapore or Suez or the Gambia or the Irrawaddy, all locales which enabled them to take cuts of interesting regional trades in nonperishable goods.
其中一些比赛是最近才举行的。
Some of these competitions were a bit more recent.
第二次世界大战在很多方面都是一场争夺投入的斗争。我们大多数人至少对农业用地和石油的战略竞争有所了解，但对工业材料的争夺同样处于前沿和中心。
World War II was in many ways a fight over inputs. Most of us have at least an inkling of the strategic competitions that took place for agricultural land and oil, but battles over industrial materials were just as front and center.
法国有铁矿石，而德国有煤炭。这两种材料都是锻造钢所必需的。你可以看到问题所在。1940 年 5 月德国入侵法国解决了这个问题。至少对于柏林而言。战后，法国人率先成立了欧洲煤钢共同体，试图用外交手段而不是子弹来解决同样的铁矿石和煤炭问题。我们今天将 ECSC 称为欧盟。
France had iron ore while Germany had coal. Both materials were necessary to forge steel. You can see the problem. Germany’s May 1940 invasion of France resolved the issue. For Berlin at least. Postwar, the French spearheaded the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community in an attempt to resolve the same iron-ore-here, coal-there problem with diplomacy instead of bullets. We know the ECSC today as the European Union.
1941 年 6 月德国入侵俄罗斯显然标志着德俄同盟的终结，但两国关系的第一个重大裂痕发生在 19 个月前，当时俄国人入侵芬兰，威胁德国进入曾是纳粹战争机器的地方镍的主要来源，是高级钢材的关键原料。
The German invasion of Russia in June 1941 obviously marked the end of the German-Russian alliance, but the first big wedge in the relationship had occurred nineteen months earlier, when the Russians invaded Finland, threatening German access to what had been the Nazi war machine’s primary source of nickel, a critical input into high-grade steel.
日本人在 1904-05 年征服朝鲜的众多原因之一是为了建筑用木材。随后日本向东南亚的扩张经常——而且准确地——被称为石油掠夺。但是本土群岛并不仅仅是能源匮乏；他们还缺乏其他只能通过物理扩张获得的核心工业材料，从铁矿石到锡到橡胶到铜到铝土矿。
Among the many reasons the Japanese conquered Korea in 1904–05 was for timber for use in construction. The subsequent Japanese expansion into Southeast Asia is often—and accurately—billed as an oil grab. But the Home Islands weren’t simply energy-poor; they also lack other central industrial materials that could only be sourced by physical expansion, ranging from iron ore to tin to rubber to copper to bauxite.
在所有情况下，这个时代的主导技术要求每个国家要么能够充分获得所有这些投入以及更多投入，要么被其他国家所支配。
In all cases, the dominant technologies of the age demanded that every country either have sufficient access to all these inputs and more, or be lorded over by others.
自 1945 年以来，此类“必需”材料的清单呈指数增长。. . 就像美国人让世界足够安全，让每个人都能接触到一切一样。这表明未来的材料竞争将更加广泛和多方面，而无法获得此类材料的后果将更加严重。这些工业材料也没有在全球范围内均匀分布。与石油一样，每个人都有自己的访问地理。
The list of such “required” materials has expanded exponentially since 1945 . . . just as the Americans have made the world sufficiently safe for everyone to have access to everything. That suggests the materials competition of the future will be far more wide-ranging and multifaceted, while the fallout from failure to access such materials will be far more damning. Nor are any of these industrial materials evenly distributed across the globe. As with oil, each has its own geography of access.
很容易根据可能的贸易区画出一些虚线，并设想一个非洲可以获得电子产品而非钢铁的投入，一个拥有核能但没有绿色技术的欧洲，或者一个拥有老式电池但缺乏能力的中国传输电力。这些脱节将不会被允许存在。
It’s easy to draw some dotted lines based on likely trading zones and envision an Africa that has access to the inputs for electronics but not steel, a Europe with nuclear power but no greentech, or a China with old-timey batteries but lacking the capacity to transmit electricity. These sorts of disconnects will not be allowed to stand.
这将是维护现代系统所需的一切的斗争。因此，每个工具都将摆在桌面上。有些人会尝试以这个换那个的交易。别人会更多。. . 他们的努力充满活力。
This will be a struggle for everything that is required to maintain a modern system. As such, every tool will be on the table. Some will attempt this-for-that trades. Others will be more . . . energetic in their efforts.
我对国家盗版的痴迷现在更有意义了吗？一般来说，盗版更有意义吗？认为我们都只是坐在我们的小泡泡里凑合着做，而不是冒险去至少尝试得到我们没有的东西，这是对人类历史进行非常有创意的阅读。我们正在进入一个杰克斯派洛会觉得非常熟悉的世界。这不是弱者的游戏。
Does my obsession with state piracy make more sense now? Does piracy in general make more sense? To think we are all going to just sit in our little bubbles and make do and not venture out to at least try to get what we don’t have is to take a very creative read of human history. We’re entering a world that Jack Sparrow would find very familiar. This is not a game for the weak.
这些获取方面的最大挑战将叠加在应对气候变化已经无法克服的挑战之上。回顾过去，事实证明石油的地缘政治令人惊讶。. . 直截了当。石油仅在少数几个地方以商业可得和可行的数量存在。波斯湾显然浮现在脑海中。我们可能不喜欢这些地点的挑战，这些挑战可能在工业晚期和全球化时代吸引了每个人的大部分注意力，但至少我们对它们很熟悉。最重要的是，石油或多或少是一次性的。
The greatest of these challenges of access will layer atop the already insurmountable challenge of dealing with climate change. Looking back, the geopolitics of oil have proven to be surprisingly . . . straightforward. Oil exists in commercially accessible and viable volumes in only a few locations. The Persian Gulf obviously comes to mind. We might not like the challenges of such locations, and those challenges may have absorbed an outsized chunk of everyone’s attention in the late-industrial and globalization eras, but at least we are familiar with them. Most important, oil is more or less a once-and-done.
在去全球化的世界中，这绝对不是它与绿色科技合作的方式。在“远离石油”的过程中，我们将远离一个复杂的、经常是暴力的、总是至关重要的供应和运输系统，而只会用至少十个以上的系统取而代之。
That is absolutely not how it will work with greentech in a deglobalized world. In “moving on from oil” we would be walking away from a complex and often-violent and always critical supply and transport system, only to replace it with at least ten more.
兆瓦发电量 对于兆瓦发电量，绿色科技需要的铜和铬是传统发电方法的两到五倍，以及许多其他材料在我们当前的发电厂输入中根本不存在：最显着的是锰、锌、石墨和硅。还有电动汽车？你认为为石油开战不好吗？仅电动汽车动力传动系统的材料输入是内燃机所需材料的六倍。如果我们真的认真对待将使一切电气化的绿色转型，那么我们对所有这些材料以及更多材料的消耗量必须增加一个数量级以上。
Megawatt of electricity-generating capacity for megawatt of electricity-generating capacity, greentech requires two to five times the copper and chromium of more traditional methods of generating power, as well as a host of other materials that do not feature at all in our current power plant inputs: most notably manganese, zinc, graphite, and silicon. And EVs? You think going to war for oil was bad? Materials inputs for just the drivetrain of an EV are six times what’s required for an internal combustion engine. If we’re truly serious about a green transition that will electrify everything, our consumption of all these materials and more must increase by more than an order of magnitude.
更糟糕的是，这些投入的混合供应链并不像石油所需的那样“简单”。我们不会“简单地”与俄罗斯、沙特阿拉伯和伊朗打交道；我们都需要定期与智利、中国、玻利维亚、巴西、日本、意大利、秘鲁、墨西哥、德国、菲律宾、莫桑比克、南非、几内亚、加蓬、印度尼西亚、澳大利亚和刚果接触，哦，是的，还有俄罗斯.
Even worse, the mixed supply chains for these inputs are not nearly as “simple” as what was required for oil. We won’t “simply” be dealing with Russia and Saudi Arabia and Iran; we will all need to engage regularly with Chile and China and Bolivia and Brazil and Japan and Italy and Peru and Mexico and Germany and the Philippines and Mozambique and South Africa and Guinea and Gabon and Indonesia and Australia and Congo and, oh yeah, still Russia.
绿色科技不仅无法在大多数地方产生足够的电力来为解决我们的气候问题做出有意义的贡献，而且认为大多数地方可以制造首先是必要的组件，仅仅是因为缺乏输入。真正不幸的对比是，在大多数地方确实存在的一种产品是劣质煤炭。全球化的终结不仅意味着我们正在抛弃人类历史上最积极的经济环境；我们可能很快就会将 2010 年代的碳排放量视为过去的美好时光。
Not only does greentech fail to generate sufficient electricity in most locations to contribute meaningfully to addressing our climate concerns but also it’s laughable to think that most locations could manufacture the necessary components in the first place, simply due to the lack of inputs. In truly unfortunate contrast, one product that does exist in most places is low-quality coal. The end of globalization doesn’t just mean we are leaving behind the most positive economic environment in human history; we may soon look at our carbon emissions of the 2010s as the good ol’ days.
暴跌前的警告
THE CAVEATS BEFORE THE PLUNGE
本章的其余部分旨在探讨这些材料对我们的生活方式有多重要。他们来自哪里。它们的用途。在一个堕落的世界中，什么是利害攸关的。
The remainder of this chapter aims to explore just how central these materials are to our way of life. Where they come from. What they are used for. What’s at stake in a degrading world.
为此，请牢记四点：
To that end, please keep four things in mind:
首先，我不可能传达所有工业材料的最终和全部。从字面上看，它们的基本形式有数百种，它们结合成数千种中间合金和混合物，创造出数百万种最终产品。我们将重点关注国际交流方面的前十五名。希望这将充分描绘出我们的现在，以便我们可以瞥见我们的未来。
First, I cannot possibly communicate the end-all and be-all of all industrial materials. There are literally hundreds of them in their base forms, which combine into thousands of intermediate alloys and mixtures to create millions of end products. We’re going to focus on the top fifteen in terms of international exchange. Hopefully, that will sufficiently map out our present so we can glean some glimpses of our future.
其次，有一个或多或少的共同线索可以遵循。今天的工业材料的故事是大规模工业化的故事，它与订单和中国的故事交织在一起。
Second, there is a more or less common thread to follow. The story of today’s industrial materials is the story of mass industrialization, which braids up with the stories of the Order and China.
该命令在很大程度上消除了材料访问的地理限制。任何人都可以随时访问任何东西；与许多其他部门一样，骑士团将“成功地域”的概念转变为全球公共利益。这个简单的事实使许多这些材料与中华人民共和国不可持续的现状密不可分。中国已成为其中许多产品的世界最大进口国、消费国和加工国。
The Order largely removed the geographic constraints of materials access. Anyone could access anything at any time; as with so many other sectors, the Order transformed the concept of Geographies of Success into a good of the global commons. That simple fact has inextricably bound up many of these materials with the unsustainable present of the People’s Republic. China has become the world’s biggest importer, consumer, and processor of many of them.
世界将在中国的衰落中幸存下来——工业材料的世界将在中国的衰落中幸存下来——但许多反弹将受到伤害。很多。并非所有反弹都是平等的。随着工业时代的成熟，随着工业材料变得越来越多、离散和专业化，它们生产和加工的地理因素变得越来越重要现在比您在树林中漫步时可以简单地刮掉一些铜的时间更多。
The world will survive China’s fall—the world of industrial materials will survive China’s fall—but many of the bounces will hurt. A lot. And not all bounces are created equal. As the Industrial Age has matured, and as industrial materials have become more numerous, discrete, and specialized, the geography of their production and processing matters far more now than when you could simply scrape up some copper during a stroll through the woods.
第三，工业化和秩序并不是故事的结局。大约从 1980 年开始，人类进入了下一个技术时代：数字时代。正如没有石就不可能有青铜，没有青铜就不可能有铁，没有铁就不可能有工业一样，没有大规模工业化就不可能发生大规模数字化。正是工业化使我们能够识别、定位、开采、提炼和提纯驱动现代社会的材料。世界上许多地方都处于去工业化的边缘，这意味着他们在这个世界上获得工业材料的机会并不长。也许最重要的是，这种迫在眉睫的不足和不完整的访问将使世界分裂。
Third, industrialization and the Order are not the end of the story. Beginning roughly in 1980, the human condition launched into its next technological era: the Digital Age. Just as Bronze could not have happened without Stone, and Iron without Bronze, and Industrial without Iron, mass digitization could not have happened without mass industrialization. It is industrialization that has enabled us to identify, locate, mine, refine, and purify the materials that drive modern society. Many parts of the world are on the verge of deindustrializing, which, among other things, means their access to the industrial materials is not long for this world. Perhaps more than anything else it is this looming inadequacy and incompleteness of access that will rive the world apart.
第四，这不全是（可怕的）坏消息。历史告诉我们，我们可能——可能——正处于材料科学一系列重大突破的边缘。与黑死病效应相对而言，正在进行的人口萧条有可能在未来几十年内大幅减少人口。对劳动年龄人口的影响将更大。无论未来的具体情况如何，我们都需要用更少的工人来度过难关。
Fourth, it isn’t all (horribly) bad news. History tells us we may—may—be on the verge of a series of massive breakthroughs in materials science. The in-progress demographic bust threatens to reduce the human population writ large over the next few decades by as much in relative terms as the Black Death effect. The impact upon working-age populations will be even bigger. No matter what specifics the future holds, we will all need to get by with fewer workers.
虽然我们在前进的过程中发现了新经济模式的优势，但我们的历史强烈表明，根据定义，更少的工人将意味着更昂贵的劳动力。这反过来应该会促使每个人想办法提高稀缺劳动力的生产率。黑死病对劳动生产率的提升使我们走上了材料科学突破的道路，这些突破促进并加强了文艺复兴和工业革命。我们的人口下降，尽管是整体的，表明可能的银（或铂，或钒）衬里可能潜伏在倾泻在地平线上的乌云中。
While we’ll be discovering the edges of our new economic models as we go, our history strongly suggests that fewer workers by definition means more expensive labor. That in turn should prompt everyone to figure out how to make that scarce labor more productive. The Black Death’s boost to labor productivity set us on the path to the materials science breakthroughs that enabled and enhanced both the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution. Our demographic decline, holistic as it is, suggests that a possible silver (or platinum, or vanadium) lining might lurk off in the dark clouds pouring over the horizon.
这种衬里取决于地球上没有使后全球化去工业化的部分，我们不太可能察觉到这种衬里，直到我在第二次文艺复兴中扮演任何个人角色都为时已晚，但你永远不会知道。这个世界让我感到惊讶。每时每刻。
This lining is dependent upon the parts of the planet that do not deindustrialize post-globalization, and we are unlikely to perceive that lining until it is far too late for me to play any personal role in a Second Renaissance, but you never know. This world surprises me. All the time.
因此，有了这样的澄清和指导方针，让我们开始吧。
So, with such clarifications and guidelines in place, let’s dive in.
基本材料
The Essential Materials
第一种材料可以说是最重要的，因为它是使从建筑物到道路再到电信塔的一切成为可能的基础材料：铁矿石。无论种类或质量如何，铁矿石至少占人类使用的每一块钢铁材料的大部分，通常超过 90%。这让了解铁矿石的世界变得非常简单：你只需要了解中国。
The first material is arguably the most important since it is the base material that makes everything from buildings to roads to telecom towers possible: iron ore. Regardless of variety or quality, iron ore comprises at least the majority—and often more than 90 percent—of the material in every bit of steel humans use. This makes understanding the world of iron ore very simple: you just need to understand China.
中国正处于现代两个典型趋势的交汇点：一方面是快速工业化和城市化，另一方面是中国标志性的超额融资。任何成功的工业化和城市化都需要新的道路、新的建筑和新的工业厂房，所有这些都需要大量的钢铁。超额融资可以帮助实现这一切，但这样做会过度建设一切，不仅意味着更多的钢铁需求的道路和建筑物，而且还包括最初用于制造钢铁的工业厂房。
China sits squarely in the intersection of two quintessential trends of the modern age: rapid industrialization and urbanization on one hand, and China’s trademark hyperfinancing on the other. Any successful industrialization and urbanization requires new roads, new buildings, and new industrial plant, all of which require massive volumes of steel. Hyperfinancing can help make all that happen, but in doing so it overbuilds everything, not just the roads and buildings that mean yet more steel demand, but also the industrial plant that is used to make the steel in the first place.
事实证明，中国的工业化进程如此之大、如此之快、资金如此之多，以至于中国不仅仅是世界上最大的钢铁生产国；它经常跻身世界四大钢材进口国之列，特别是在质量等级较高的产品系列中。但过度融资也意味着中国在生产钢铁时完全不考虑国内需求的实际情况，因此中国也是世界上最大的钢铁出口国——尤其是质量等级较低的钢铁产品。
China’s industrialization push has proven so huge and so fast and so overfinanced that China isn’t simply the world’s largest producer of steel; it regularly ranks among the world’s top four importers of steel, particularly the product sets on the higher end of the quality scale. But that over-finance also means China produces steel with zero regard for the reality of domestic needs, and so China is also the world’s largest steel exporter—particularly steel product sets on the lower end of the quality scale.
所有这一切都需要大量的铁矿石。中国不仅是世界上最大的东西进口国，它的进口量也不仅仅是世界其他地区的总和。中国进口超过世界其他地区总和的三倍。中国是全球铁矿石市场。至于产量，澳大利亚出口了全球一半的铁矿石量，巴西出口了剩余的一半。毫不奇怪，中国几乎吞噬了所有这些南半球大国的出口，以及来自俄罗斯、印度和南非的其他大量出口。
All that requires a worldful of iron ore. China isn’t just the world’s largest importer of the stuff, it doesn’t simply take in more than the rest of the world combined. China imports more than the rest of the world combined times three. China is the global iron ore market. As to production, Australia exports half of global iron ore volumes, with Brazil exporting half the remainder. Unsurprisingly, China gobbles up nearly all these Southern Hemispheric powers’ exports, as well as additional big chunks from Russia, India, and South Africa.
中国也不是唯一使用钢铁的国家；它只是唯一一个钢铁经济从根本上失控的国家。其他大多数人都使用离家较近（或在许多情况下在家）生产的铁矿石。他们的余额被钢铁回收这一非常大的业务所填补。发达国家每年大约有 1% 的建筑物被拆除，用于加固它们的每一块钢材都被熔化、重新锻造并获得第二次生命。或第三。或第十八。
Nor is China the only country that uses steel; it’s just the only country where the economics of steel are so fundamentally out of whack. Most everyone else uses iron ore produced a bit closer to home (or in many cases, at home). Their balances are rounded out by the very big business of steel recycling. Roughly 1 percent of buildings in the advanced world are torn down every year, and every scrap of the steel used to reinforce them is melted down, reforged, and given a second life. Or third. Or eighteenth.
中国的贪婪与其他地方钢铁生产相当平静的步伐之间的这种双重性使预测变得相当直截了当。
This duality between the ravenousness of China and the rather placid pace of steel work everywhere else makes the forecast rather straightforward.
随着世界去全球化，世界上绝大部分的铁矿石生产来自那些面临有限甚至没有安全威胁的国家：按降序排列，澳大利亚、巴西、印度、南非、加拿大和美国。然而，出口全球大量钢铁的国家——按升序排列为乌克兰、德国、俄罗斯、韩国、日本，最重要的是中国——处于“面临严重并发症”和“完全搞砸”之间的滑动天平上。世界将出现严重的钢铁短缺，与此同时，制造钢铁的原材料供应将会过剩。
The vast bulk of the world’s iron ore production comes from countries that face limited to no security threats as the world deglobalizes: in descending order, Australia, Brazil, India, South Africa, Canada, and the United States. However, the countries that export the vastness of global steel—in ascending order, Ukraine, Germany, Russia, Korea, Japan, and above all China—are somewhere on the sliding scale between “facing severe complications” and “utterly screwed.” The world is going to have massive shortages of steel, at the same time that the supplies of the raw material to make that steel will overflow.
解决方案很简单——世界将需要更多的冶炼能力——但重要的是要明白并非所有的钢铁都是生而平等的。与大多数材料不同，所有钢都是 100% 可回收的，但再生钢与原生钢不同。
The solution is simple—the world will need more smelting capacity—but it is critical to understand that not all steel is created equal. Unlike most materials, all steel is 100 percent recyclable, but recycled steel is not the same as virgin steel.
将钢想象成一张铝箔。然后把它弄皱，把它弄平。见鬼，试着熨一下。然后冲洗并重复。再生钢与原生钢一样坚固，但不能做得那么漂亮。因此，再生钢材用于钢筋、工字梁和汽车零部件，但新鲜钢材用于您可以看到的外露应用，例如家电覆层和屋顶。
Think of steel as if it were a sheet of aluminum foil. Then crumple it, and smooth it out. Hell, try ironing it. Then rinse and repeat. Recycled steel is just as strong as virgin steel, but it cannot be made as pretty. So recycled steel is used in rebar and I-beams and auto parts, but fresh steel is used in exposed applications you can see, such as appliance cladding and roofing.
第一轮钢是用煤为动力的高炉炼成的，以提高碳含量，从而使钢更坚固。这个过程的碳排放量非常大，因为，你知道，它使用煤。此外，钢锻件要求不仅仅是任何煤，而是一种杂质被烧尽的煤衍生物，称为炼焦煤。本质上，煤必须燃烧两次。
First-round steel is made with coal-powered blast furnaces to up the carbon content, which makes the steel stronger. The process is extremely carbon intensive, because, you know, it uses coal. Also, steel forging demands not just any coal, but a coal derivative that’s had its impurities burned out, called coking coal. In essence the coal has to be burned twice.
有点类似的鼓风炉也可以处理回收，但一个更有效的过程是使用一种叫做电弧炉的东西让电流流过废钢并使其通电直至熔化。*这意味着再生钢材的最佳经济效益不仅涉及物理安全和接近原始投入，还涉及便宜便宜的电力。
Somewhat similar blast furnaces can also handle the recycling, but a far more efficient process is to use something called an arc furnace to run a current through scrap steel and literally electrify it until it melts.* That means the best economics for recycled steel involve not simply physical security and proximity to the raw inputs, but also cheap-cheap-cheap electricity.
在所有这三方面的赢家将是美国，美国的墨西哥湾沿岸看起来最有希望，原因有三重原因：电价高、大量未开发的工业空间——尤其是在潜在的港口位置——以及邻近大型本地和区域市场（想想德克萨斯、东海岸和墨西哥）。再加上充足的煤炭供应，美国人也可以开始生产新钢。
The winner on all three counts will be the United States, with America’s Gulf Coast looking the most promising, for the triple reasons of having great electricity prices, plenty of greenfield industrial space—particularly at potential port locations—and proximity to both large local and regional markets (think Texas, the East Coast, and Mexico). Add in ample coal supplies and the Americans could get into virgin steel production, too.
看起来非常有利于钢铁回收的次要地区包括瑞典（水电）和法国（核电）。澳大利亚有一个出人意料的好机会，可以从开采矿石的低价值业务转向锻造原钢的高价值业务。澳大利亚人需要做的“所有”事情就是将他们的铁矿石和煤炭从产地运到一起。. . 在大陆的两侧。在阳光明媚、多风的内陆地区安装大量太阳能电池板和风力涡轮机，澳大利亚人也可以以低廉的价格回收钢铁。
Secondary locations that look very favorable for steel recycling include Sweden (hydropower) and France (nuclear power). Australia has a wonderful opportunity to surprise to the upside and move from the low-value business of digging up ore to the high-value business of forging virgin steel. “All” the Aussies need to do is bring their iron ore and coal together from where they are produced . . . on opposite sides of the continent. Put up an army of solar panels and wind turbines throughout the sunny, windy Outback and the Aussies could recycle steel on the cheap as well.
这四个国家的巨大成功听起来可能不足以将全球钢铁供应维持在目前的水平。你说得对。他们甚至不会靠近。但我们并没有认为这个选项是可行的，甚至是必要的。一个没有中国的世界需要的东西不到一半，而且还没有考虑到未来世界的建设和工业化步伐可能要慢得多。
Outsized successes in these four countries might not sound like enough to maintain global steel supplies at their current level. You’re right. They would not even come close. But we’re not kicking around that option as feasible, or even necessary. A world without China needs less than half as much of the stuff, and that’s before considering the likely far slower paces of building and industrializing that will define the future world.
现代世界所有事物不可或缺的另一种材料是铝土矿，它是为我们提供铝的原材料。
Another material integral to all things in the modern world is bauxite, the raw material that gives us aluminum.
铝精炼过程非常简单。露天开采产生铝土矿，然后将其在氢氧化钠中煮沸以产生称为氧化铝的中间产品。这种可卡因白色粉末在陶瓷、过滤器、防弹衣、绝缘材料和油漆中有多种用途。大约 90% 的氧化铝随后实质上被Jaws 2 式电化，直到它变成铝, 它继续被模制、弯曲和挤压成从飞机和汽车零件到汽水罐到框架到管道到外壳到机械到电线的所有东西——几乎任何重量轻和/或低成本导电性是首要问题的东西. 假设您从质量不错的矿石开始，这个过程也是相当可预测的：四到五吨铝土矿变成两吨氧化铝变成一吨成品金属。通常，铝土矿和氧化铝加工商属于同一家公司，而铝冶炼厂在不同国家是完全不同的实体。
The aluminum refining process is pretty straightforward. Strip mining produces bauxite ore, which is then boiled in sodium hydroxide to create an intermediate product called alumina. This cocaine-white powder has a variety of uses in ceramics, filters, body armor, insulation, and paint. Some 90 percent of alumina is then in essence electrified Jaws 2–style until it becomes aluminum, which goes on to be molded, bent, and extruded into everything from airplane and car parts to soda cans to frames to tubings to casings to machinery to wires—pretty much anything where low weight and/or low-cost conductivity is a primary concern. The process is also pretty predictable, assuming you begin with decent-quality ore: four-to-five tons of bauxite becomes two tons of alumina becomes one ton of finished metal. As a rule, bauxite mines and the alumina processors are owned by the same firms, while aluminum smelters are completely different entities in different countries.
中国长期以来一直在开采其优质的铝土矿储量，现在只剩下越来越少的低质量矿山，这些矿山的产出需要更多的过滤和更多的电力，以生产每吨矿石更少的最终产品。这使中国变成了从世界各地大量进口铝土矿的国家。截至 2021 年，中国吸收了所有国际贸易铝土矿的三分之二，同时冶炼了约五分之三的铝。按照真正的中国时尚，中国的大部分铝产品几乎立即倾销到国际市场。
China has long since mined itself out of its high-quality bauxite reserves, and is now left with a dwindling supply of low-quality mines whose output requires much more filtering and much more power to produce much less end product per ton of ore. That has turned China into a voracious importer of bauxite from everywhere. As of 2021, China absorbs two-thirds of all internationally traded bauxite, while smelting about three-fifths of all aluminum. In true Chinese fashion, the majority of China’s aluminum output is almost immediately dumped on international markets.
这既伟大又可怕。它的好处在于它简化了对供应链的理解：中国对超额融资和过度建设的嗜好一直都在中国。可怕的是，世界上使用最多的金属之一的全球供应链被一个失败的系统所包裹。当中国崩溃时，世界将面临铝的全球短缺，因为其他地方根本没有足够的冶炼设施来弥补超过几个百分点的悬而未决的短缺。
This is both great and awful. It’s great in that it simplifies understanding of the supply chains: China’s penchant for hyperfinancing and overbuilding makes it all China, all the time. It is awful in that the global supply chain for one of the world’s most utilized metals is wrapped up in a failing system. When China cracks, the world will face global shortages of aluminum, as there simply are not sufficient smelting facilities elsewhere to cover more than a few percentage points of the pending shortfall.
问题不在于获得铝土矿的机会太多。这些东西来自在后全球化体系中大体上没有问题的国家：澳大利亚生产世界出口的四分之一以上，巴西、几内亚和印度各占十分之一。不，问题是力量。从铲子到最终金属，电力约占总成本的 40%——这一统计数据考虑了这样一个事实，即在大多数冶炼厂，电价低得离谱和/或得到大量补贴。拥有丰富水电的国家——挪威、加拿大、俄罗斯——都是大玩家。
The problem isn’t so much access to bauxite. The stuff is sourced in countries that will be broadly okay in the post-globalized system: Australia produces more than one-quarter of the world’s exports, with Brazil, Guinea, and India kicking in another tenth each. No, the problem is power. From shovel to final metal, electricity accounts for roughly 40 percent of the total cost—and that’s a statistic that takes into account the fact that in most places that smelt, power is ridiculously cheap and/or heavily subsidized. Countries with ample hydropower—Norway, Canada, Russia—are big players.
这种限制限制了新冶炼厂的选址。最大的新玩家将是老玩家。由于页岩革命，美国已经拥有世界上最便宜的电力。再加上一些世界上最好的绿色科技潜力，该国大部分地区的电价在未来几年可能会下降。德克萨斯州可能会感受到最大的竞争优势，那里的页岩相关和绿色技术发电趋势与大量港口容量重叠，可容纳一到五家冶炼厂。
Such a restriction limits the wheres for siting new smelters. The biggest new player will be an old player. Courtesy of the shale revolution, the United States already has the world’s cheapest electricity. Add in some of the world’s best greentech potential and power prices in large portions of the country are likely to go down in the years to come. The biggest competitive advantages will likely be felt in Texas, where the shale-related and greentech power generation trends overlap with plenty of port capacity to site a smelter or five.
挪威充足的水力发电能力加上其位于欧洲大陆上方的位置，可以生产但三分之一的需求支持挪威的大规模扩张。幸运的是——对每个人来说——铝很容易回收利用。在欧洲，捕获计划足以满足三分之一的需求。
Norway’s ample hydro capacity combined with its location just above a mainland Europe that can produce but one-third of its needs argues for massive Norwegian expansions. Luckily—for everyone—aluminum recycles very easily. In Europe, capture programs are enough to supply one-third of demand.
对于人类来说，铜是一切的起点。没有什么比陶罐更容易熔炼，没有什么比手和石头更容易塑造，铜是我们的第一种金属。有时我们甚至很幸运能在自然界中找到它作为真正的金属。
For humanity, copper is where it all started. Easy to smelt in nothing more complicated than a clay pot, easy to shape with nothing more complicated than hands and rocks, copper was our very first metal. Sometimes we were even lucky enough to find it in nature as actual metal.
这段恋情从未结束。用砷或锡掺杂铜，你会得到青铜，这是一种更适合工具的更坚固的金属。将其制成管材或容器，铜的天然防腐和抗菌特性可实现更长期的食品和饮料储存、减少疾病和延长寿命。将我们的历史回顾快进到工业时代，我们发现铜也是一种出色的电导体，将古代世界的材料提升为工业世界的材料。
The love affair never ended. Dope copper a touch with either arsenic or tin and you get bronze, a firmer metal that’s better for tools. Turn it into tubing or containers and copper’s natural antiseptic and antimicrobial characteristics allow for longer-term food and drink storage, reduced disease, and extended life spans. Fast-forward our review of history to the Industrial Age and we discovered copper was also an excellent conductor of electricity, elevating the material of the ancient world to the material of the industrial world.
如今，大约四分之三的铜矿最终用于某种电气应用，从电灯中的电线到发电厂中的发电机，再到手机中的半导体，再到微波炉中的磁铁。另一个四分之一进入建设，与管道和屋顶材料是最大的一块。其余大部分用于电动机。随着全球电动汽车热潮的高涨，未来几十年我们将需要更多的铜。
Today some three-quarters of copper mined ends up in some sort of electrical application, ranging from the wires in your lights to the generators in power plants to the semiconductors in your phone to the magnets in your microwave. Another quarter finds its way into construction, with plumbing and roofing materials the biggest slice. The bulk of the remainder finds its way into electric motors; with the world’s EV craze surging we’ll need a lot more copper in the decades to come.
但这就是未来。现在，故事全在中国。国家大，人口多，工业化速度快。中国的一切都需要大量的铜，因此中国从世界各地收集金属和矿石，并拥有世界上最大的 20 家铜冶炼厂中的 10 家。
But that’s the future. For now, the story is all China. Large country, large population, rapidly industrializing. Everything about China demands copper in large volume, and so China hoovers up both metal and ore from the world over, and houses ten of the world’s twenty largest copper smelters.
这意味着铜生产商面临着黑暗的中期未来。铜需求以及铜价与电气化、建筑和交通领域众所周知的需求直接相关。中国是世界上所有这三个领域中最大、发展最快的市场，但大多数生产商都面临着多年的亏损。
This means copper producers face a dark midterm future. Copper demand, and from it copper prices, are directly linked to very well-known demand in the sectors of electrification, construction, and transport. Melon-scoop out China, the world’s largest and most rapidly expanding market in all three sectors, and most producers face years of operating in the red.
当然，关键词是“最”。智利和秘鲁在阿塔卡马沙漠的许多断层线上经营着世界上质量最高的矿山，这些矿山的单位产出运营成本也是最低的。这两个国家共同提供了全球需求的五分之二。智利还将其大部分矿石冶炼成铜金属，使其成为后中国世界的世界一站式商店。从安全的角度来看，智利既是一个好邻居，也是拉丁美洲政治最稳定的国家，这是一件好事。但请注意那些地震。
The key word, of course, is “most.” Chile and Peru run the world’s highest-quality mines along the Atacama Desert’s many fault lines, mines that also have the lowest operating costs per unit of output. Collectively the two countries supply two-fifths of global needs. Chile also smelts most of its own ore into copper metal, making it the world’s one-stop shop in a post-China world. It’s a good thing Chile is both in a good neighborhood from a security point of view and the most politically stable country in Latin America. But mind those earthquakes.
未来材料
The Future Materials
钴将是一个棘手的问题。
Cobalt is going to be a tricky one.
与所有材料一样，钴有许多次要工业用途，特别是在金属合金中，但与它们的大需求来源相比，所有这些用途都相形见绌：电池——特别是处于能源转型核心的可充电电池。较大的 iPhone 每部重近半盎司，而特斯拉平均重 50磅。
Like all materials, cobalt has any number of minor industrial uses, particularly in metal alloys, but all of them combined pale when compared to their big demand source: batteries—specifically the sort of rechargeable batteries that lie at the heart of the energy transition. The larger iPhones have nearly half an ounce each, while the average Tesla has fifty pounds.
您认为让一切电气化和走向绿色是唯一的出路吗？截至 2022 年，钴是唯一一种能量密度足够高的材料，甚至暗示我们可以使用可充电电池来应对气候挑战。如果没有钴，它根本无法完成 - 甚至无法尝试- 并且比我们目前可以获得的钴要多得多。假设其他所有条件都相同（当然，考虑到本书的主题，这是一个令人捧腹的声明），仅 2022 年至 2025 年之间的年度钴金属需求就需要翻一番，达到 220,000 吨，才能跟上绿色愿望。
You think that electrifying everything and going green is the only way forward? As of 2022, cobalt is the only sufficiently energy-dense material that even hints that we might be able to use rechargeable batteries to tech our way out of our climate challenges. It simply cannot be done—even attempted—without cobalt, and a lot more cobalt than we currently have access to, at that. Assuming all else holds equal (which is, of course, a hilarious statement considering the topic of this book), annual cobalt metal demand between 2022 and 2025 alone needs to double to 220,000 tons simply to keep pace with Green aspirations.
那不会发生。那不可能发生。
That won’t happen. That can’t happen.
与铁矿石/钢铁关系一样，将钴矿石提炼成成品金属完全包含在中国的超级金融模式中。世界上 14 个最大的钴来源中有 8 个为中国所有，几乎所有的钴精炼都发生在中国（加拿大位居第二）。
Like with the iron ore/steel nexus, the refining of cobalt ore into finished metal is utterly wrapped up in China’s hyperfinance model. Eight of the world’s fourteen largest cobalt sources are China-owned, and nearly all cobalt refining occurs in the PRC (with Canada a very distant second).
好像这还不够糟糕，根本就没有“钴矿”这样的东西。钴是一种与其他材料在相似时间和相似条件下形成的棘手物质。全球约 98% 的钴产量是镍和铜产量的副产品。实际情况比这还要复杂，因为并非所有的镍矿和铜矿都会产生钴。超过一半的商业可用钴来自一个国家：刚果民主共和国（一个既非民主也非共和国的近乎独裁的地方那远非彻底失败）。大部分产品是非法生产的，手工采矿者（一个奇特的术语，用来形容那些拿着铁锹、爬过铁丝网并躲避瞄准射击的警卫以挖出一些矿石的人）出售他们的产品给中国中间商几分钱。
As if that weren’t bad enough, there is no such thing as a “cobalt mine.” Cobalt is one of those tricky things formed at similar times and under similar conditions as other materials. Some 98 percent of global cobalt production is generated as a by-product of nickel and copper output. The reality is even more complicated than that, because not all nickel and copper mines generate cobalt. More than half of commercially usable cobalt comes from a single country: the Democratic Republic of the Congo (a near-dictatorial place that is neither democratic nor a republic nor all that far from being outright failed). Much of that production is generated illegally, with artisanal miners (a fancy term to describe individuals who grab a shovel, climb over barbed wire, and evade shoot-on-sight guards in order to scrape out a few bits of ore) selling their output to Chinese middlemen for pennies.
在一个日益去中心化的世界中，刚果肯定不在能够“成功”的国家名单上，其未来很可能是霍布斯式的饥荒无政府状态。随着刚果的发展，世界钴的获取也随之变化。
In an increasingly decentralized world, Congo is most certainly not on the list of countries that will “make it,” with its future likely to be a Hobbesian sort of famine-riddled anarchy. As goes Congo, so goes the world’s cobalt access.
未来只有四种选择，而且没有一种是美好的。
There are only four options for the future, and none of them are pretty.
选项 1：从第三和第四大生产国澳大利亚和菲律宾开采焦油。即使将生产大规模扩展到偏远和地理困难的地区，澳大利亚人和菲律宾人最多只能生产世界所需的五分之一。与澳大利亚人和菲律宾人有着良好关系的国家——主要是美国和日本——将获得优先权，但之后几乎一无所有。这会将最有能力稳定全球钴供应的国家从关心供应稳定的国家名单中剔除。
Option 1: Mine the tar out of the third- and fourth-largest producers, Australia and the Philippines. Even with massive production expansions into remote and geographically difficult regions, the Aussies and Filipinos can produce at most one-fifth of what the world needs. Countries with which the Aussies and Filipinos enjoy excellent relations—primarily the United States and Japan—would get first dibs, but then there would be next to nothing left over. That would remove the countries most capable of stabilizing global cobalt supplies from the list of countries that care about said stabilization of supplies.
选项 2：有人带着大量军队入侵刚果民主共和国，并控制了通往矿山的路线。不幸的是，刚果的钴并不靠近海岸，而是在该国南部的丛林深处。最权宜之计的解决方案是与南非合作，建立一条非常长的走廊，一直延伸到南部非洲的高原脊柱。这正是上世纪初英国人在塞西尔·罗兹 (Cecil Rhodes) 的地方领导下所走的路线。南非于 1915 年获得独立后，约翰内斯堡在其附属铁路线上接管了该项目，保持了对整个地区的完全殖民控制——包括穿过所谓的独立国家津巴布韦和赞比亚的部分地区。不断的帝国干预使这条路线保持畅通，直到种族隔离在 1990 年代初结束。从那以后，这条铁路线开始加速失修。
Option 2: Someone invades the Democratic Republic of the Congo with a whole lot of troops and seizes control of a route to the mines. Unfortunately, Congo’s cobalt is nowhere near the coast, but instead deep in the country’s southern jungles. The most expedient solution would be to partner with South Africa and establish a very long corridor all the way up the highland spine of southern Africa. This is precisely the route the Brits followed under the local leadership of Cecil Rhodes around the turn of the last century. After South Africa attained independence in 1915, Johannesburg took over the project at its attendant rail line, maintaining flat-out colonial control over the entire zone—including the portions that crossed through the supposedly independent countries of Zimbabwe and Zambia. Constant imperial intervention kept the route open until apartheid ended in the early 1990s. Since then the rail line has fallen into accelerating disrepair.
选项 3：找出不需要钴（或至少不需要那么多）的更好电池的材料化学。很好听，而且很多聪明的钱都在追逐这个选项，但很多聪明的钱多年来一直在追逐这个选项，但几乎没有什么有意义的突破。*还需要考虑操作化的滞后。如果我们在您阅读本段时以某种方式破解了更好电池的代码，那么建立大规模生产的供应链仍需要十多年的时间。在最好的情况下，我们将至少在 2030 年代之前一直使用钴。
Option 3: Figure out the materials chemistry of a better battery that does not require cobalt (or at least not nearly as much). It sounds nice, and lots of smart money is chasing this option, but lots of smart money has been chasing this option for years with few meaningful breakthroughs.* There’s also the lag of operationalization to consider. If we somehow cracked the code on a better battery as you read this paragraph, it would still take more than a decade to build out the supply chain for mass production. In the best-case scenario, we will be stuck with cobalt at least until the 2030s.
选项 4：放弃绿色转型所说的必不可少的大规模电气化。
Option 4: Give up on the mass electrification the green transition says is essential.
因此，选择你的选择：在多个国家采取老派的帝国主义做法，以剥削特定材料，同时剥削或射杀绝望的当地人，他们试图为自己争取一口，或者放弃并坚持使用煤炭和天然资源气体。未来充满了这样有趣的选择。
So take your pick: go old-school imperial on multiple countries in order to strip-mine a specific material while alternatively exploiting or shooting desperate locals who try to get a bite of the action for themselves, or go without and stick to coal and natural gas. The future is full of such fun choices.
只要我们谈论蹩脚的电池化学，让我们深入研究锂。
As long as we’re talking about crappy battery chemistries, let’s dive into lithium.
锂在元素周期表中占据第三位，这意味着它只有三个电子。其中两个电子被锁定在一个称为内层原子壳的轨道区域中，这是一种奇特的说法，它们在家里很开心，哪儿也不会去。这使得一个电子能够在锂金属中快速移动，随着情绪的变化从一个原子跳到另一个原子。快速移动电子是“电”的一种稍微非技术性的说法。
Lithium occupies the third spot on the periodic table, which, among other things, means it has but three electrons. Two of those electrons are locked up in an orbital zone called the inner atomic shell, a fancy way of saying they are happy in their home and aren’t going anywhere. That leaves one electron with the ability to scoot about within lithium metal, jumping from atom to atom as the mood strikes. Scooting electrons about is a slightly nontechnical way of saying “electricity.”
每个锂原子一个电子可以如此快速移动。那真是太可怜了。锂是我们在地球上所能接触到的能量密度最低的材料之一，这也是为什么一辆特斯拉需要 140磅的锂才能运行的原因之一——以及为什么制造不含钴的锂电池是相当于在风中撒尿的绿色科技。
One electron per lithium atom can so scoot. That’s pretty piss-poor. Lithium is among the least energy-dense materials we have access to on Earth, one of the reasons why a single Tesla needs 140 pounds of it to function—and why making a lithium battery without cobalt is the greentech equivalent of pissing in the wind.
幸运的是，锂的供应系统远没有钴供应系统那么令人沮丧。全球绝大部分锂矿来自澳大利亚的矿山，或智利和阿根廷的蒸发池——它们都不应在生产中面临订单后问题。但是，让人联想到钴——也让人联想到铁矿石——真正的加工（约占总量的 80%）发生在超级融资的中国。锂加工的未来可能类似于铁矿石：原材料供应线很好，但精炼和增值将需要在电力便宜的新地点进行。与铁矿石一样，美国、瑞典、法国，可能还有澳大利亚看起来都不错。
Luckily, the supply system for lithium is considerably less depressing than that of cobalt. The vast bulk of global lithium ore comes from either mines in Australia, or evaporation ponds in Chile and Argentina—none of which should face post-Order issues in production. But, reminiscent of cobalt—and reminiscent of iron ore—the real processing, some 80 percent of the total, occurs in hyperfinanced China. The future of lithium processing will likely resemble that of iron ore: the raw material supply lines are fine, but refining and value-add will need to happen in a new location where power is cheap. As with iron ore, the United States, Sweden, France, and possibly Australia look pretty good.
与此同时，锂的生产、锂提炼成金属以及将金属装入可充电电池底盘是人类有史以来能源密集度最高的工业过程之一，这一令人不安的事实值得深思。
In the meantime, it is worth absorbing the disturbing fact that the production of lithium, its refining into metal, and the incorporation of that metal into rechargeable battery chassis is among the most energy-intensive industrial processes humanity has ever devised.
让我用一些肮脏的绿色数学来打击你。
Let me smack you with some dirty Green math.
一个典型的 100 千瓦时特斯拉锂离子电池是在中国的一个主要以煤为动力的电网上建造的。这种能源和碳密集型制造过程释放 13,500 公斤二氧化碳排放量，大致相当于一辆传统汽油动力汽车行驶 33,000 英里所释放的碳污染。33,000 英里的数字假设特斯拉仅由 100% greentech 产生的电力充电。更现实？美国电网由 40% 的天然气和 19% 的煤炭供电。这种更传统的发电模式将特斯拉的“碳收支平衡”点扩展到 55,000 英里。如果有的话，这夸大了电动汽车的绿色友好程度。大多数汽车（包括电动汽车）都在白天行驶。这意味着它们在夜间充电，此时太阳能发电不能成为燃料组合的一部分。*
A typical 100-kilowatt-hour Tesla lithium-ion battery is built in China on a largely coal-powered grid. Such an energy- and carbonintensive manufacturing process releases 13,500 kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions, roughly equivalent to the carbon pollution released by a conventional gasoline-powered car traveling 33,000 miles. That 33,000-miles figure assumes the Tesla is only recharged by 100 percent greentech-generated electricity. More realistically? The American grid is powered by 40 percent natural gas and 19 percent coal. This more traditional electricity-generation profile extends the “carbon break-even” point of the Tesla out to 55,000 miles. If anything, this overstates how green-friendly an electric vehicle might be. Most cars—EVs included—are driven during the day. That means they charge at night, when solar-generated electricity cannot be part of the fuel mix.*
但就目前而言，我们只有锂和钴。迄今为止，它们是我们唯一能够充分解码以大规模制造可充电电池的材料。我们知道，我们所走的“绿色”道路是不可持续的。在我们的材料科学得到改进之前，我们只是没有更好的考虑。
But for now, lithium and cobalt are all we have. To date they are the only materials we have sufficiently decoded to make rechargeable batteries out of at scale. We know that the “green” path we are on is unsustainable. We just don’t have a better one to consider until our materials science improves.
西尔弗是现代伟大的无名英雄。我们显然将其用于珠宝和精美餐具以及政府货币储备中，但白银也经常以不为人知的数量用于从电子产品到摄影到催化剂到制药到电信塔到喷气发动机到电镀到太阳能电池板到镜子到海水淡化厂的一切事物从键盘到玻璃上的反光涂层。如果我们的绿色科技材料科学进步到足以使更好的电池或远程电力传输线成为现实，那么银无疑将成为使这些技术发挥作用的超导体不可或缺的一部分。
Silver is the great unsung hero of the modern age. We obviously use it in jewelry and fine tableware and government monetary reserves, but silver is also used in often-unnoticed amounts in everything from electronics to photography to catalysts to pharmaceuticals to telecommunication towers to jet engines to electroplatings to solar panels to mirrors to desalination plants to keyboards to reflective coatings on glass. Should our greentech materials science advance enough to make better batteries or long-range power transmission lines a reality, silver will undoubtedly be integral to the superconductors that will make such technologies function.
在供应方面，既有坏消息也有好消息。首先，不好。中国的超级工业化和超级融资对白银世界的影响与对工业材料世界的影响类似，而且影响很大。本地生产大，矿石进口大，金属加工大，出口大。
In terms of supply, there’s both some bad and good news. First, the bad. China’s hyperindustrialization and hyperfinancing have had a similar impact on the world of silver as they have on the world of industrial materials, writ large. Big local production, big importing of ores, big processing into metals, and big exports.
现在好了。大约四分之一的白银产量来自专门的银矿，其余的则与铅、铜或锌共同生产。银金属——尤其是来自珠宝的银金属——也是非常可回收的。在提取加工和提炼回收方面，白银的生产周期在地域上分布良好。因此，尽管中国在白银供应的各个阶段都是一个大玩家——实际上是最大的玩家，但它远不及主要玩家，也无法通过强弱来过度威胁其他国家的白银供应。
Now the good. Roughly one-quarter of silver production is from dedicated silver mines, while the remainder is coproduced with lead or copper or zinc. Silver metal—particularly from jewelry—is also eminently recyclable. In terms of extraction and processing and refining and recycling, silver’s production cycle is well distributed geographically. So while China is a big—indeed the biggest—player at all stages of silver supply, it is nowhere near the majority player, nor is it in a position to either by strength or weakness overly threaten silver supply to others.
永远的材料
The Always Materials
人类一直都喜欢goooold！自第一代法老时代以来，它的耐腐蚀性就使它对珠宝商很有用。这种与财富的联系，再加上它持久的光泽，使它成为现代货币作为保值手段和支持者的常年宠儿。在世界大战和美元崛起之前，黄金是大多数国家用来支持其经济体系的东西。即使在美元至上的时代，黄金在大多数国家的储备中通常也排在第三或第四位。
Humans have always loved goooold! Its resistance to corrosion has made it useful to jewelers since the time of the first pharaohs. This association with wealth, combined with its persistent shininess, has made it a perennial favorite as a store of value and backer of currencies right up to the modern age. Until the world wars and the rise of the U.S. dollar, gold was what most countries held to back their economic systems. And even in the age of U.S. dollar supremacy, gold typically ranks third or fourth in most countries’ reserves.
在现代——更具体地说是在数字时代——我们也发现了更多平淡无奇的用途。金的抗腐蚀能力和高导电性相结合，使其在半导体领域具有独特的应用，包括电源管理和信息传输。
In the modern age—more specifically in the Digital Age—we’ve found more prosaic uses as well. The combination of gold’s immunity to corrosion and its high electrical conductivity grants it niche applications in the semiconductor space, both for power management and information transmission.
工业用途？查看。个人用途？查看。政府用途？查看。高价值？查看？保值？查看。漂亮的？再检查一遍！
Industrial uses? Check. Personal uses? Check. Government uses? Check. High value? Check? Store of value? Check. Pretty? Double check!
然而，然而，黄金绝对是愚蠢的。在人类使用的所有材料中，几乎只有一种，几乎没有机会用于有用的冶金或增值。您不会将金与更好的材料混合以获得更好的导电性，因为金已经是最好的导体。您不会将它与次要材料混合以降低其导电性，因为您可以使用更便宜的替代品获得相同的结果。大约唯一一次将黄金制成合金是为了让您的戒指在佩戴时不会弯曲。除此之外，黄金就是黄金。要么它是产品的唯一用途，要么它的使用毫无意义。如此完美的用途非常有限，以至于运动奖章跻身年度需求前十名之列。
And yet and yet and yet gold is absolutely stupid. Nearly alone among all the materials that humanity uses, there is next to no opportunity for useful metallurgy or value-add. You don’t mix gold with a better material to get better conductivity, because gold already is the best conductor. You don’t mix it with a lesser material to degrade its conductivity, because you can get the same result with cheaper substitutes. About the only time gold is alloyed is to make it so your rings don’t bend while you wear them. Aside from that, what’s gold is gold is gold. Either it is the only thing to use for a product, or its use would be pointless. Such perfect uses are so limited that athletic award medals break into the top-ten list for annual demand.
这使得它的供应链。. . 简单的。矿石被开采、提纯、转化主要是纯金属，和。. . 那么你就完成了。好吧，减去一小步就完成了。
That makes its supply chain . . . simple. Ore is mined, purified, transformed into mostly pure metal, and . . . then you’re done. Well, you’re done minus one itty-bitty step.
与其说是增加价值，不如说是建立声望的唯一方法是让一个你信任的人，一个你尊重的人——一个很酷的人——把黄金金属变成我们在詹姆斯·邦德电影和想象中都见过的那些花哨的、商业交易的金条。诺克斯充满了。*精炼商和回收商将黄金运送到最后的冷却步骤；淘金无慢船。这些很酷的家伙将它全部融化，检查纯度，塑造那些标志性的锭，并在最终产品上贴上他们个人的保证印章。这些重要人物中的任何一个都是瑞士人或阿联酋人。就像我说的：酷。*
The only way not so much to add value but to establish cachet is to have someone you trust, someone you respect—someone cool—turn gold metal into those fancy, commercially traded bars that we’ve all seen in James Bond films and imagine Fort Knox is full of.* Refiners and recyclers fly gold to this final coolification step; there’s no slow boat for gold. These cool dudes melt it all down, check for purity, fashion those iconic ingots, and put their personal stamps of guarantee on the final product. Any of these dudes that matter are either Swiss or Emirati. Like I said: cool.*
几十年来，中国一直试图强行进入这最后一步。乍一看，中国似乎有机会：它是世界上最大的金矿产地，也是许多中游炼油厂的所在地。但人们去中国是为了大规模生产和仿冒，而不是为了排他性和真实性。除非发生一系列极其不幸的冶炼事故，导致上述大多数帅哥丧生，否则中国不会进入该行业的这个阶段。
China has been trying to muscle into this final step for decades. At a glance it would seem China has a shot: it is the world’s largest source of gold ore, and home to many midstream refineries. But people go to China for mass production and counterfeiting, not for exclusivity and authenticity. Barring a series of extremely unfortunate schmelting accidents that kill most of the aforementioned cool dudes, China will not enter this stage of the industry.
在一个没有中国的世界里，最大的打击将是矿石流入，这对黄金的影响远不及对其他任何东西的影响。也许黄金最有价值的特征是黄金就是黄金；它永远不会腐蚀。根据整体经济情况，从回收中提取的黄金占“产量”的六分之一到二分之一，而在经济压力时期，这一数字会激增。去全球化的刺眼光芒肯定会鼓励很多人融化所有这些阶级戒指。拥有全球供应链，简单的精炼过程，以及迄今为止金条最具技术性的方面如果生产发生在其他地方，中国可能会无害地被排除在整个供应链之外。
In a world without China, the biggest hit would be to ore inflow, and that’s not nearly as damning for gold as it would be for anything else. Perhaps gold’s most valuable characteristic is that gold is gold is gold; it never corrodes. Depending on overall economic circumstances, gold sourced from recycling is anywhere from one-sixth to one-half of “production” with that number ballooning in times of economic stress. The harsh light of deglobalization is certainly going to encourage a lot of people to melt down all those class rings. With a global supply chain, a simple refining process, and by far the most technical aspect of gold bar production happening elsewhere, China could harmlessly be scooped out of the entire supply chain.
铅长期以来一直是一种神奇的物质。易于开采。易于细化。易于塑形。容易合金化。易于掺入任何化学混合物中以显示我们想要的任何特性。铅特别耐水腐蚀。到工业时代中期，我们将其用于汽车、油漆、屋顶、玻璃、管道、釉料、涂料和汽油。
Lead has long been a magical substance. Easy to mine. Easy to refine. Easy to shape. Easy to alloy. Easy to incorporate into any chemical mix to manifest whatever properties we want. Lead is particularly resistant to corrosion by water. By the mid–Industrial Age we were using it in cars and paint and roofing and glass and pipes and glazes and coatings and gasoline.
铅只有一个缺点：它会让你发疯！铅的毒性会在大脑中产生无穷无尽的健康并发症，甚至包括鼓励分离和暴力行为。在美国，我们从 1970 年代开始从我们的系统中清除铅，系统地禁止在一个又一个产品中使用铅。在接下来的半个世纪里，我们空气中的环境铅含量下降了 90% 以上。与此同时，暴力犯罪案件从历史高位降至历史低位。相关性？确实。因果关系？让我们一起去一个强大的也许。*
Lead only had one downside: it makes you CRAZY! Lead’s toxicity generates no end of health complications in the brain, up to and including encouraging dissociative and violent behavior. In the United States we began purging lead from our systems in the 1970s, systematically banning its use in product after product. Over the next half century, the ambient level of lead in our air dropped by more than 90 percent. At the same time, instances of violent crimes subsided from record highs to record lows. Correlation? Definitely. Causation? Let’s go with a strong maybe.*
一旦铅从可能被摄入的地方去除，它剩下的用途就非常非常少了：一些金属合金（不与人接触）、弹药（铅的毒性甚至可能被认为是一种好处的产品） ), 以及一些陶瓷和一些玻璃制品。但大男孩是铅酸电池，几乎所有机动车辆的关键部件，无论大小。1970 年前的电池所含铅量不到所有铅的三分之一。现在他们吸收了超过五分之四。
Once lead is removed from where it might be ingested, its remaining uses are very, very few: some metal alloys (which don’t come into contact with people), ammunition (a product for which lead’s toxicity might even be perceived as a bonus), and a bit in ceramics and some glass products. But the big boy is lead-acid batteries, a key component in nearly every motorized vehicle regardless of size. Pre-1970 batteries took less than one-third of all lead. Now they absorb more than four-fifths.
从供应链的角度来看，这使得铅有点奇怪。
This makes lead a bit of an odd duck from a supply chain point of view.
在拥有数十年汽车文化的发达国家，更换电池的过程建立在回收利用的规定中。在美国和类似国家，大约 90% 的铅需求来自回收的铅产品。
In advanced countries that have had car cultures for decades, the process of replacing batteries builds in provisions for recycling. In the United States and countries like it, some 90 percent of lead needs are met from recycled lead products.
在最近的工业化国家中，中国位居榜首，这一过程较少。. . 正式化。大多数中国汽车电池被收集起来，但只有三分之一被官方回收。其余的似乎成为该国无处不在的假冒产品的牺牲品，并在作为新产品出售之前简单地贴上新标签。*考虑到旧的、过度使用的铅电池容易泄漏，而且铅仍然有毒，这不是一件好事。
In more recently industrialized countries, with China at the top of the list, the process is less . . . formalized. Most Chinese car batteries are collected, but only one-third are officially recycled. The rest seem to fall prey to the country’s omnipresent counterfeiting and simply get new labels before being sold on as new product.* Considering that old, overused lead batteries tend to leak, and that lead is still freakin’ toxic, this is not a good thing.
无论如何，这种大规模的铅回收意味着发达国家可以继续前进，而不会错过任何一个节拍。如果中国发现自己无法获得进口铅矿石，它至少可以安慰自己，一个改进的回收计划既可以解决大部分供应限制问题，又可以营造更健康的生活环境。
In any case, such mass lead recycling means the developed world can mosey right on without missing a beat. And should China find itself unable to access imported lead ore, it can at least comfort itself that an improved recycling program would both solve a big chunk of supply constraints and make for healthier living environments.
接下来我们来看看 mol-ib-den-im、mol-y-bud-um、mo-lib-de-num，哦操我，MOLYBDENUM——我们只是称它为“moly”。
Next we come to mol-ib-den-im, mol-y-bud-um, mo-lib-de-num, oh fuck me, M-O-L-Y-B-D-E-N-U-M—we’re just going to call it “moly.”
撇开令人沮丧的名字不谈，钼是我们大多数人都没有听说过的材料之一，这是有充分理由的。它不会出现在普通的汽车保险杠或门把手上。钼因其能够承受极端温度而不显着改变形状而受到重视。不像您八月份在维加斯度假时那样的极端温度，更像是您受到凝固汽油弹袭击时的极端温度。如果处理得当，钼合金钢甚至可以变成超级合金，这种材料即使在很容易达到其实际熔点的情况下也能保持其所有正常特性。
Frustrating name aside, moly is one of those materials that most of us haven’t heard of, for good reason. It doesn’t tend to pop up in your average car bumper or doorknob. Moly is valued for its ability to weather extreme temperatures without significantly shifting form. Not extreme temperatures like when you are vacationing in Vegas in August, more like extreme temperatures when you are under napalm attack. If done right, moly-alloyed steel even becomes a superalloy, a material that maintains all its normal characteristics even when within easy reach of its actual melting point.
军队喜欢在装甲、飞机和卡宾枪的枪管中使用钼。在民用领域，钼往往用于非常高端的工业设备和电机，以及各种需要尽可能坚韧的不锈钢，无论是在建筑、防滚架、高端亚洲烹饪刀、或超高端灯泡。以粉末形式使用钼。. . 给花椰菜施肥？*
Militaries love to use moly in armor and aircraft and carbine barrels. In the civilian sector moly tends to serve in very-high-end industrial equipment and motors, as well as sorts of stainless steels that need to be as tough as physically possible, whether in construction, roll cages, high-end Asian cooking knives, or super-high-end lightbulbs. In powdered form moly is used to . . . fertilize cauliflower?*
钼的未来可能还不错。钼产生于一系列步骤，对于每种不同类型的源矿石通常是不同的，通常在不同的设施中，通常在西半球，并且通常与为其合金化的特定钢铁铸造厂有关。其结果是供应系统比铝土矿之类的供应系统更加分散，更难以垂直整合。这里没有中国人的束缚。
The future of moly is likely a-okay. Moly is produced in a series of steps, often different for each different type of source ore, often in different facilities, often in the Western Hemisphere, and often linked to the specific steel foundries that alloy it. The result is a supply system far more segmented and resistant to vertical integration than something like bauxite. No Chinese stranglehold here.
时髦的材料
The Funky Materials
成品铂金非常漂亮，因此经常用于高端珠宝（就像我的“终生属于我”所以不要尝试任何愚蠢的承诺乐队）。其他铂族金属——例如钯、铑和铱——几乎没有那么闪亮，但这并不意味着它们没有用处。
Finished platinum is so very pretty and as such is often used in high-end jewelry (like my you-are-mine-for-life-so-don’t-try-anything-stupid commitment band). Other platinum-group metals—palladium, rhodium, and iridium, for example—aren’t nearly as shiny, but that hardly means they aren’t hella useful.
在任何需要促进或调节化学反应的事物中，整个群体都是普通的明星。这些用途包括但几乎不限于任何燃烧任何东西的排气系统，以便将排放曲线转移到毒性较小的方向，镀层以防止腐蚀（特别是在高温下），牙科工作（给定时间，牙齿和人类唾液几乎可以摧毁任何东西），以及任何需要能够有选择地促进或阻止电流流动的产品，尤其是所有类型的半导体。
The entire group are regular stars in anything that requires the facilitation or regulation of chemical reactions. Such uses include, but are hardly limited to, the exhaust systems of anything that burns anything in order to shift emissions profiles in less toxic directions, platings to impede corrosion (particularly at high temperatures), dental work (given time, teeth and human saliva can destroy nearly anything), and any product that needs to be able to selectively encourage or discourage the flow of electricity, most notably semiconductors of all types.
世界上大约四分之三的铂族金属 (PGM) 都来自一个国家——南非——那里几乎所有的东西都来自一个单一的岩层，即布什维尔德火成岩复合体。想象一下，如果一个六岁的孩子做了一个二十层的蛋糕，然后不知何故能够从底部注入糖霜，或者添加内部糖霜层和糖霜。. . 爆炸。现在用岩浆来做这一切。
Some three-quarters of the world’s platinum-group metals (PGMs) are sourced from a single country—South Africa—where nearly everything comes from a single rock formation, the Bushveld Igneous Complex. Imagine if a six-year-old made a twenty-layer cake and then somehow was able to inject frosting up from the bottom, alternatively adding internal frosting layers as well as frosting . . . explosions. Now do it all with magma.
那就是布什维尔德。这是一个奇怪的地质问题，据我们的集体知识，地球上其他任何地方都没有复制过，但它的一致性和变化的奇怪组合使它可以说是人类发现的最有价值的矿床。Bushveld 实际上泄漏了铬、铁矿石、锡和钒，但南非人掠过所有这些世界级的矿床以寻找好东西：铂族矿石在这里——而且只在这里——存在于一个纯粹的状态，未与其他较小的矿石混合。较小的矿石，如该死的钛。
That’s the Bushveld. It’s a weird-ass geological hiccup that to our collective knowledge hasn’t been replicated anywhere else on Earth, but its odd combination of consistency and variation has made it arguably the most valuable mineral deposit humanity has ever discovered. The Bushveld practically leaks chromium, iron ore, tin, and vanadium, but the South Africans brush right by all these world-class deposits to go after the good stuff: the platinum-group ores that here—and only here—exist in an unadulterated state, unmixed with other, lesser ores. Lesser ores like freakin’ titanium.
在其他任何地方都发现了 PGM，它们是其他矿石的副产品，最常见的是铜和镍。继南非之后，俄罗斯是迄今为止世界上最大的生产国，全球近五分之一的铂族金属来自诺里尔斯克，这是一个苏联建造的北极流放地，工人在地下一英里处辛勤劳作。近年来，诺里尔斯克发生了如此多的可怕错误，以至于整个地方都介于超级基金网站和寒冷的西藏地狱之间。
Everywhere else PGMs are found, they are a by-product of other ores, most commonly copper and nickel. After South Africa, Russia is by far the world’s largest producer, with nearly one-fifth of global PGMs coming out of Norilsk, a Soviet-built Arctic penal colony whose workers toil a mile underground. So many things have gone so horribly wrong at Norilsk in recent years that the entire place is a cross between a Superfund site and a frigid Tibetan hell.
第三名到最后一名合计占产出的剩余 5%。
Third through last place combined account for the remaining 5 percent of output.
即使您能找到合适的矿石，您也很难摆脱困境：至少需要七吨矿石和六个月的工作才能提取一金衡盎司的铂金或其姊妹金属。
Even if you can source the appropriate ore, you’re hardly out of the woods: it takes a minimum of seven tons of ore and six months of work to extract a single troy ounce of platinum or its sister metals.
简而言之，如果您想要铂金或其姊妹材料，您可以与南非人或俄罗斯人打交道，或者您可能没有。如果你真的不这样做，在一个晴朗、微风的日子里，你的汽车尾气将比有记录以来最糟糕的烟雾还要糟糕。稀有中的稀有：中国不是任何一种原铂族金属或成品铂族金属的前五名生产国、进口国或出口国。使用PGMs的技术简直超越了中国人。
Simply put, if you want platinum or its sister materials, you deal with the South Africans, or the Russians, or you probably go without. And if you do go without, on a clear, breezy day, your vehicle exhaust will be nastier than the nastiest smog ever recorded. Rarities of rarities: China isn’t a top-five producer, importer, or exporter of a single one of the raw or finished PGMs. The technologies that use PGMs are simply beyond the Chinese.
稀土元素既非常复杂又非常简单。
Rare earth elements are simultaneously very complicated and very simple.
复杂的是，不只有一种“稀土”。正如“元素s ”一词所暗示的那样，稀土是一类材料，包括镧、钕、钷、铕、镝、钇和钪等。
Complicated in that there isn’t just one “rare earth.” As the word “elements” suggests, rare earths are a category of materials that include lanthanum, neodymium, promethium, europium, dysprosium, yttrium, and scandium, among others.
复杂的是，稀土几乎用于现代的所有事物，从太阳镜到风力涡轮机到计算机到金属合金到灯到电视到石油精炼到汽车到计算机硬盘驱动器到电池到智能手机到钢到激光器。*复杂的是，现代生活离不开它们。复杂的是稀土由铀衰变或 产生。. . 等待它。. . 爆炸的星星。
Complicated in that rare earths are used in almost everything in the modern era, from sunglasses to wind turbines to computers to metal alloys to lights to televisions to petroleum refining to cars to computer hard drives to batteries to smartphones to steel to lasers.* Complicated in that modern life cannot happen without them. Complicated in that rare earths are produced by either uranium decay, or . . . wait for it . . . exploding stars.
然而稀土很简单。很简单，因为有几种稀土元素一点也不稀有；铈在地壳中比铜更常见。原因很简单，因为稀土矿石通常是许多其他类型采矿的副产品。简单在于我们准确地知道如何从开采的混合矿石中提取每一种单独的稀土元素，而简单在于问题是没有人愿意做这项工作。
Yet rare earths are simple. Simple in that several of the rare earth elements are not rare at all; cerium is more common in Earth’s crust than copper. Simple in that the ores of rare earths are often a by-product of many other sorts of mining. Simple in that we know precisely how to fish each individual rare earth element out of the mixed ore that is mined, and simple in that the problem is that no one wants to do the work.
有两个问题。
There are two issues.
首先，精炼过程需要数百个——在某些情况下是数千个——分离单元，这是一个对主要是酸的大桶的奇特术语，以慢慢地促使每个单独的元素从其相似密度的兄弟姐妹中分离出来。你知道，除了非常危险之外，即使一切正常，炼油厂也会留下大量废品。毕竟，实际地球上稀土的主要来源是铀的杂乱放射性衰变。这对业内人士来说都不是新闻。稀土提取技术可以追溯到第二次世界大战之前。那里没有商业秘密。
First, the refining process requires hundreds—and in some cases thousands—of separation units, a fancy term for vats of mostly acid, to slowly encourage each individual element to move away from its similar-density siblings. Beyond being, you know, incredibly dangerous, even if everything works well, refiners will be left with a lot of waste product. After all, the primary source of rare earths on the actual Earth is from the messy, radioactive decay of uranium. None of this is news to those in the industry. The techniques for rare earth extraction date back to before World War II. No trade secrets there.
其次，中国为我们其他人做了所有肮脏的工作。2021 年，全球约 90% 的稀土生产和加工在中国。中国的环境法规会让路易斯安那人脸红，而中国的超额融资和补贴计划意味着世界其他任何地方的生产都无法在数量上与之竞争。中国人在 1980 年代后期开始大规模生产稀土，并在 2000 年代迫使几乎所有其他生产商停业。
Second, China has done all the dirty work for the rest of us. In 2021 some 90 percent of global rare earth production and processing was in the PRC. Chinese environmental regulations would make Louisianans blush, while Chinese hyperfinancing and subsidization schemes mean that no production elsewhere in the world can compete on the numbers. The Chinese started producing rare earths en masse in the late 1980s, and had forced pretty much all other producers out of business by the 2000s.
从某些角度来看，中国人帮了我们所有人的忙。毕竟，他们已经吸收了所有的污染和所有的风险，同时以大约 1980 年前四分之一的成本为世界提供精炼稀土金属。如果没有这些廉价而充足的供应，数字革命将会走上截然不同的道路。面向大众的计算和智能手机可能从未出现过。
From some points of view, the Chinese have done us all a favor. After all, they have sucked up all the pollution and all the risk, while providing the world with refined rare earth metals at roughly one-quarter of the pre-1980 cost. Without those cheap and ample supplies, the Digital Revolution would have taken a very different course. Computing and smartphones for the masses may have never occurred.
问题是，世界是否已经不可挽回地依赖中国的产出，以及这种产出的突然消失——要么是因为中国的崩溃，要么是因为愚蠢——是否会给我们带来厄运全部。早在 2000 年代，中国就首次公开威胁日本公司（并含蓄地威胁美国公司）以切断稀土供应。
The question is whether the world has become irrecoverably dependent upon Chinese output, and whether the sudden disappearance of that output—due to either Chinese collapse or dickishness—would doom us all. China first publicly threatened Japanese firms (and implicitly threatened American firms) with rare earths cutoffs back in the 2000s.
我对那个特别的问题投了反对票。首先，稀土的真正价值不在于矿石（这很普遍），甚至不在于精炼（这一过程在近一个世纪前就已完善），而是在于将稀土金属转化为最终产品的成分。中国人在这方面充其量只是马马虎虎。中国人承担了所有风险并补贴了所有产出，而非中国公司则承担了大部分增值工作并获得了大部分回报。
I vote “no” on that particular concern. First, the real value of rare earths isn’t in the ore (that’s pretty common) or even the refining (that process was perfected nearly a century ago), but instead in turning the rare earth metals into components for end products. The Chinese are at best so-so at that. The Chinese have taken all the risks and subsidized all the output, while non-Chinese firms do most of the value-add work and reap most of the rewards.
其次，因为矿石并不稀有，因为加工不是秘密，而且因为中国的第一次威胁是在十多年前，南非、美国、澳大利亚已经有备用的采矿和加工设施、马来西亚和法国。他们只是看不到很多活动，因为中国的东西仍然可以买到，而且更便宜。如果明天中国稀土从全球供应中消失，待命的加工设施将立即启动，并可能在几个月内取代所有中国出口。在外面一年。任何一家使用稀土的公司，只要不是一个彻头彻尾的白痴，就已经储备了数月的稀土储备。打嗝会比比皆是；世界末日不会召唤。
Second, because the ore isn’t rare and because the processing isn’t a secret and because the first Chinese threats were more than a decade ago, there are already backup mining and processing facilities in existence in South Africa, the United States, Australia, Malaysia, and France. They just don’t see a lot of activity, because the Chinese stuff is still available and still cheaper. If Chinese rare earths were to vanish from global supplies tomorrow, processing facilities on standby would start up right away and likely be able to replace all Chinese exports within a few months. A year on the outside. And any company that uses rare earths led by any person who isn’t a complete moron already has months of rare earths stockpiled. Hiccups would abound; Armageddon would not call.
稀土是世界等待中国垮台的一个很好的例子，而且这一次实际上已经做好了准备。
Rare earths are a great example of the world just waiting for China to fall, and for once actually being ready for it.
可靠的材料
The Reliable Materials
镍是其中一种材料，其本身的用途很少，但与单一的伴随材料一起构成了单一过程的组成部分，这使其对每个经济部门都绝对必不可少。标准钢会弯曲、生锈、腐蚀、翘曲，并在高温或低温下失去部分一致性。但是，在钢混合物中添加大约 3.5% 的镍和少量铬，您会得到一种强度更高、性能更佳的合金很大程度上消除了这些顾虑。我们通俗地称这种产品为“不锈钢”——几乎所有应用中使用的所有钢材的支柱。这种不锈钢的锻造占全球镍需求总量的三分之二以上。其他镍金属合金占另外五分之一。十分之一用于电镀，其余用于电池。
Nickel is one of those materials that have few uses by themselves but are integral to a single process with a single companion material that makes it absolutely essential to every single economic sector. Standard steel bends and rusts and corrodes and warps and loses some of its coherence with high or low temperatures. But add about 3.5 percent nickel and a splash of chromium to the steel mix, and you get an alloy that is both stronger and largely eliminates those concerns. We colloquially know this product as “stainless”—the backbone of nearly all steel used in every single application. The forging of such stainless accounts for more than two-thirds of total global nickel demand. Other nickel metal alloys account for another fifth. One-tenth goes into electroplating, with the balance going into batteries.
正如人们所预料的那样，中国是世界上最大的镍矿石进口国、精炼国和使用国，但钢铁几乎无所不在，无处不在，这意味着即使中国大规模、高速的工业化和城市化也无法主导整个市场. 与铝不同的是，在铝中，大部分成品金属都用于出口，而中国提炼并混入钢材中的大部分镍矿石在国内使用。因此，尽管中国对铝市场的影响是一个全大写问题，已经摧毁了全球竞争对手的产能，但中国与镍相关的钢铁习惯“仅仅”是高度扭曲的。
As one might expect, China is the world’s largest importer, refiner, and user of nickel ore, but the ubiquitous nature of steel in pretty much everything, everywhere, means that even China’s large-scale, breakneck industrialization and urbanization cannot dominate the entire market. Unlike aluminum, where much of the resulting finished metal is exported, the bulk of the nickel ore the Chinese refine and blend into steel is used at home. So whereas China’s impact on the aluminum market is an ALL-CAPS issue that has destroyed the capacity of competitors the globe over, China’s nickel-related steel habits are “merely” highly distortionary.
镍是全球贸易崩溃不会自动导致市场崩溃的稀有材料之一。前五名生产商中的四家——印度尼西亚、菲律宾、加拿大和澳大利亚——在其附近地区拥有替代镍销售市场。前五名中的最后一个——法国领土新喀里多尼亚——很可能会因为内部辩论而看到其产量暴跌关于它是想成为一个失败的殖民地还是一个失败的国家的问题压倒了所有其他想法。
Nickel is one of those rare materials where the implosion of global trade will not automatically result in the implosion of the market. Four of the top five producers—Indonesia, the Philippines, Canada, and Australia—are ones that have alternative markets for their nickel sales in their own neighborhoods. The last of the top five—the French territory of New Caledonia—is highly likely to see its output plunge as internal debates over whether it wants to be a failed colony or a failed country override all other thinking.
排名第六的是俄罗斯，它几乎所有的镍都来自诺里尔斯克那个可怕的城市附近的一个综合设施。再加上俄罗斯地缘政治、金融、人口和交通方面的复杂情况，我不指望诺里尔斯克在几十年后成为全球金属供应的主要来源。
The number six slot goes to Russia, which produces nearly all its nickel from a single complex near that godawful city of Norilsk. Add in Russia’s building geopolitical, financial, demographic, and transport complications, and I’d not count on Norilsk being a major source of global metals supplies a couple of decades from now.
把这一切加起来，镍市场可能实际上实现了很多即将成为世界的人将变得非常陌生的东西：平衡。
Add it all up and the nickel market might actually achieve something that much of the soon-to-be world will become eminently unfamiliar with: balance.
我不会为硅的更乏味的用途而烦恼。进入玻璃的硅通常来自普通沙子。显然，净化是必需的，但我们在罗马之前将近两千年就破解了该过程的密码，而在现代，它不需要特别复杂的工业基础来大量生产玻璃。我也不打算研究“沙子”的其他重要用途——非常规石油生产（又名“水力压裂”）的输入过程的一部分。几年后，石油服务公司发现几乎所有基砂都可以正常工作。不，我们将转而专注于附加值更高、更融入现代世界日常生活的硅产品。
I’m not going to bother with the more blasé uses for silicon. The silicon that goes into glass is typically sourced from normal sand. Purification is required, obviously, but we cracked the code for that process nearly two millennia before Rome, and in modern times it doesn’t require a particularly sophisticated industrial base to churn out glass at volume. Nor am I going to look at the other big use for “sand”—part of the input process for unconventional oil production (aka “fracking”). After a few years, the oil services firms discovered that nearly any basic sand will work just fine. No, we’re going to instead focus on the silicon products that are much higher up on the value-add scale and more integral to day-to-day life in the modern world.
首先，好消息。真的_好消息。硅非常普遍，约占地壳的四分之一。我们最常将硅视为沙子，因为我们会立即和情感地将沙子附着在海滩和湖泊上，但实际上世界上大部分硅都被锁在石英和硅石中。这种岩石比沙滩好得多，因为它们没有被藻类、塑料、皮下注射针头或小便污染。如果你正在制造玻璃，98% 的纯度是可以的，但作为实际工业投入的硅的绝对最低等级是 99.95% 的纯度。到达那里需要高炉，这通常需要大量煤炭。全面的，拥有大量过剩工业产能的国家对环境问题毫不在意。
First, the good news. The really good news. Silicon is wildly common, accounting for something like one-quarter of the earth’s crust. We think of silicon most commonly as sand because we immediately and emotionally attach sand to beaches and lakes, but in reality most of the world’s silicon is locked up in quartz and silica rocks. Such rocks are far better than beach sand because they aren’t contaminated with algae, plastics, hypodermic needles, or pee. If you’re making glass, 98 percent purity is a-okay, but the absolute lowest grade for silicon as an actual industrial input is 99.95 percent pure. Getting there requires a blast furnace, which typically requires a lot of coal. Overall, the process isn’t all that complicated—you basically just bake the quartz until anything that is not silicon burns away—which means some 90 percent of this firststep processing tends to be done in countries like Russia and China, countries with a lot of surplus industrial capacity that don’t give two shits about environmental issues.
对于我们使用硅的大部分用途而言，这种质量水平都非常好。大约三分之一的产品最终以我们所知的硅酮形式出现——一个广泛的类别，包括从密封剂到厨房用具、垫圈、涂料到假胸部的所有东西——以及用于陶瓷、水泥和玻璃的硅酸盐。将近一半与铝制成合金，制成富有创意的名称硅铝，这种材料已在很大程度上取代了任何产品中的钢材，在这些产品中，减轻大量重量比能够承受坦克外壳更重要，尤其是在火车和汽车框架中。*
This quality level is more than fine for most of what we use silicon for. Roughly one-third of production ends up in things we know as silicones—a broad category that includes everything from sealants to kitchen utensils to gaskets to coatings to fake boobs—and silicates, which go into ceramics, cement, and glass. Nearly half is alloyed with aluminum to make the creatively named silumins, which have largely replaced steel in any product where shedding a lot of weight is more important than being able to take a tank shell, most notably in train and automobile frames.*
这些产品既重要又无处不在，但它们并不是故事中最吸引人的部分。这来自最后两个产品类别。
Such products are both important and omnipresent, but they aren’t the sexy part of the story. That comes from the final two product categories.
首先是太阳能电池板。“标准”硅的 99.95% 纯度远远不够。高炉中的第二轮使硅的纯度高达 99.99999%。*第二轮比第一轮的纯粹烘焙要复杂得多。中国的 GCL 集团是唯一能够大规模管理这种精确度的中国实体，使其负责全球供应的三分之一。其余来自少数发达国家公司。这种纯硅被纳入太阳能电池中，使太阳能电池板发挥作用，组装工作通常在中国完成。
First up are solar panels. The 99.95 percent purity of “standard” silicon isn’t anywhere enough. A second round in the blast furnace gets the silicon up to 99.99999 percent pure.* Round two is far more sophisticated than round one’s bake-it-pure. China’s GCL Group is the only Chinese entity that can manage such precision at scale, making it responsible for one-third of global supply. The rest comes from a smattering of developed-world companies. This pure silicon is incorporated into the solar cells that make solar panels do their thing, with the assembly work more often than not done in China.
其次是半导体，硅是迄今为止最大的输入量。由于一些较新的半导体的形状接近原子级，因此硅的纯度必须达到 99.99999999%。*在中国不可能做到。一旦一些第一世界的公司这种超稀薄的电子级硅被送到东亚沿岸的某个地方，在洁净室的大桶中熔化，并生长成构成所有半导体制造基础的晶体。
Second are semiconductors, with silicon being by far the biggest input by volume. And since some of the newer semiconductors are shaped at nearly the atomic level, the silicon must be 99.99999999 percent pure.* No way that gets done in China. Once some first-world company makes this ultra-rarified, electronic-grade silicon, it is sent on to somewhere in the East Asian Rim to be melted into a clean-room vat and grown into the crystals that form the foundation of all semiconductor manufacture.
在一个后全球化的世界里，所有这些来来回回，来来回回，大多数东西至少两次通过中国循环，将是一个坚实的no bueno。由于安全和供应链的简单性问题，预计中国人和俄罗斯人将在很大程度上被排除在全球加工之外。任何避开太阳能和电子应用的东西都应该或多或少没问题。基础工作在技术上没有挑战性。
In a post-globalized world, all this back-and-forth-and-back-and-forth-and-back-and-forth, with most stuff cycling through China at least twice, will be a solid no bueno. Expect the Chinese and Russians to get largely cut out of global processing simply due to issues of security and supply chain simplicity. Anything shy of solar and electronics applications should be more or less okay. The base work isn’t technically challenging.
这就是好消息结束的地方。数字表明地球上一半的人口都可以与太阳能电池板的想法吻别。问题不在于石英。我们已经在澳大利亚、比利时、加拿大、智利、中国、法国、德国、希腊、印度、毛里求斯、挪威、俄罗斯、泰国、土耳其和美国生产太阳能品质的石英。问题是净化：它只在中国、日本、美国、德国和意大利进行。
That’s where the good news ends. Figure half the population of the planet can kiss the very idea of solar panels goodbye. The problem isn’t the quartz. We already produce solar-quality quartzes in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Chile, China, France, Germany, Greece, India, Mauritius, Norway, Russia, Thailand, Turkey, and the United States. The problem is the purification: it is only done in China, Japan, the United States, Germany, and Italy.
但真正的问题将是半导体。最终构成电子级硅的世界上大约 80% 的优质石英来自北卡罗来纳州的一个矿山。想保持现代感？您几乎必须与美国人相处融洽。他们很快就会拥有他们从未拥有过的东西：对数字时代基础材料的资源控制。（他们也将在整个高端半导体领域占据主导地位，但下一章将具体细分。）
But the real problem will be the semiconductors. Some 80 percent of the world’s high-quality quartz that ultimately makes up electronic-grade silicon comes from a single mine in North Freakin’ Carolina. Want to remain modern? You pretty much must get along well with the Americans. They will soon have something they have never had: resource control over the base material of the Digital Age. (They’re also going to do pretty well dominating the overall high-end semiconductor space, but that particular breakdown is in the next chapter.)
铀有点不标准，因为直到最近，铀需求的主要来源还致力于通过按一下按钮炸毁地球。人类当然仍然存在问题，随着秩序的结束，人类将拥有更多、更多、更多，但至少没有人在储存数万枚战略原子弹头。现实比听起来还要好。从 1993 年开始，美国人和俄罗斯人不仅开始将弹头与运载系统分离，而且还从这些弹头中取出铀芯，并将它们旋转成可以转化为核电站燃料的材料。到这个百万吨到兆瓦的计划时2013年完工时，两国共改造了约两万枚核弹头，双方各“只”拥有约6000枚。
Uranium is a bit nonstandard because until recently a leading source of uranium demand went to efforts to blow up the planet with the push of a button. Humanity certainly still has problems, and with the end of the Order it will have many, many, many more, but at least no one is stockpiling tens of thousands of strategic atomic warheads. The reality is even better than it sounds. Starting in 1993, the Americans and Russians started not only separating their warheads from their delivery systems, but also removing the uranium cores from those warheads and spinning them down into the sort of material that can be transformed into fuel for nuclear power plants. By the time this megatons-to-megawatts program was completed in 2013, the two countries had transformed some twenty thousand warheads, leaving each side with “only” about 6,000 apiece.
对全球和平有好处吗？当然！但这种努力扭曲了铀市场。美国人和俄罗斯人使用这种弹头转化为燃料的计划为其民用核反应堆提供动力。在美国，近 20 年来，这种减速武器材料为 10% 的电网供电，而且由于大部分核能燃料是可回收的，因此铀市场在未来几十年仍将处于扭曲状态。
Great for global peace? Certainly! But the effort skewed the uranium market. The Americans and Russians used this warheads-turned-fuel program to power their civilian nuclear reactors. In the United States, such spun-down weapons material powered 10 percent of the grid for nearly two decades, and since large portions of nuclear power fuel are recyclable, the uranium market will remain distorted for decades to come.
如果你不是美国人或俄罗斯人，你唯一的核能燃料来源是铀矿石，将其研磨成称为黄饼的粉末，将其加热至气态以将铀与废矿石分离，然后旋转铀气体通过一系列离心机，使铀的不同同位素至少部分分离。将它们部分分开，你会得到民用级的铀混合物，其中大约含有 3-5% 的裂变材料，可以加工成动力反应堆燃料棒。将它们旋转到弹头的 90% 裂变水平，美国政府可能会为您举办一场惊喜派对，其中包括一些高咖啡因的特种部队和一些经过深思熟虑的实弹精确制导弹药。
If you’re not American or Russian, your only source of nuclear power fuel is to source uranium ore, grind it into a powder called yellowcake, heat it to a gaseous state to separate the uranium from the waste ore, and spin that uranium gas through a series of centrifuges so the different isotopes of uranium at least partially separate. Split them up partially and you get a civilian-grade mix of uranium that is roughly 3–5 percent fissile material, which can be processed into power reactor fuel rods. Spin them up to the 90 percent fissile level for a warhead and the U.S. government is likely to throw you a surprise party complete with some high-caffeinated Special Forces troops and a few thoughtfully live, precision-guided munitions.
在后秩序世界中，铀作为动力燃料可能会变得更受欢迎。一个 1 吉瓦的燃煤电厂运行一年需要 320万公吨煤，而一个 1 吉瓦的核电厂只需要 25 公吨的动力燃料浓缩铀金属，这使得铀成为唯一可以提供能源的电力输入。理论上可以飞到它的最终用户那里。
In a post-Order world, uranium is likely to become more popular as a power fuel. While running a 1-gigawatt coal power plant for a year requires 3.2 million metric tons of coal, a 1-gigawatt nuclear power plant requires only 25 metric tons of power-fuel-enriched-uranium metal, making uranium the only electricity input that could theoretically be flown to its end user.
世界民用核舰队也不太可能发生如此疯狂的改组，或者至少由于准入限制而不会发生如此疯狂的改组。世界前四大核能发电国是美国、日本、法国和中国。我们已经覆盖了美国。日本和法国都有能力在没有援助的情况下走出去采购他们的需求。中国的铀来自邻国哈萨克斯坦和俄罗斯。只要有中国，它就能得到铀。
There’s also unlikely to be all that crazy a shakeup to the world’s civilian nuclear fleet, or at least not one due to access restrictions. The world’s top four nuclear-power-generating countries are the United States, Japan, France, and China. The United States we’ve covered. Japan and France both have the capacity to go out and source their needs without assistance. China’s uranium comes from neighbors Kazakhstan and Russia. So long as there is a China it will be able to get its hands on uranium.
在采购充足物资方面面临最大风险的地点将是那些缺乏军事采购能力的中等国家他们自己投入并生活在完全排除安全运输的地理位置——瑞士、瑞典、台湾、芬兰、德国、捷克共和国、斯洛伐克、保加利亚、罗马尼亚、匈牙利、乌克兰和韩国。当您在列表中移动时，供应不足的可能性会增加。
The locations that face the most risk in sourcing sufficient supplies will be those middle powers that both lack the military capacity to source their own inputs and live in geographic locations that utterly preclude safe shipments—Switzerland, Sweden, Taiwan, Finland, Germany, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Ukraine, and Korea. The likelihood of insufficient supplies increases as you move through the list.
低锌已经伴随我们很长时间了。锌矿石经常被发现与铜混合在一起，将它们一起熔炼会产生黄铜。我们一直（有意）制造这些东西至少四千年，尽管直到最近的千年我们才真正理解它的物理化学（铜离子和锌离子可以在晶体中相互替代）金属合金晶格）。
Lowly zinc has been with us for a long time. Zinc ore is often found commingled with copper, and smelting them together generates brass. We’ve been making that stuff (on purpose) for at least four thousand years, although it wasn’t until the most recent millennium that we truly understood the physical chemistry of it all (copper and zinc ions can replace one another in the crystal lattice of metal alloys).
锌的独特之处不是它不会腐蚀——它很容易腐蚀——而是它腐蚀的方式。锌物体的外层会迅速氧化，形成一层铜锈，阻止氧气渗透到更深的地方。瞧！腐蚀产生保护！在一些应用中，锌只需要存在而不是实际结合到整个金属物体上。例如，用螺栓或电线将锌圆盘固定在船舵或掩埋的丙烷罐上，锌会在保护罐或舵的同时腐蚀掉。我知道！变态！
What’s unique about zinc isn’t that it will not corrode—it corrodes very easily—but instead how it corrodes. The outer layer of a zinc object oxidizes quickly, forming a patina that prevents oxygen from penetrating any deeper. Voilà! Corrosion generates protection! In some applications, the zinc only needs to be present rather than actually bonded to the entirety of the metal object. Bolt or wire a disc of zinc onto a ship’s rudder or buried propane tank, for example, and the zinc will corrode away to nothing while protecting the tank or rudder. I know! Freaky!
快进到工业时代对电气和化学的理解，我们已经将锌的使用升级到广泛的产品中。
Fast-forward to the electrical and chemical understandings of the Industrial Age and we’ve upgraded our use of zinc into a wide range of products.
保护上述丙烷罐的相同电气特性使锌成为碱性电池中的首选成分。我们仍然使用大量含锌黄铜，因为它比铜更容易加工且强度更高，同时保持了锌神奇的抗腐蚀特性。它在从蜂窝塔到管道再到长号的所有方面都很有用。锌不仅可以轻松地与铜融合，还使其成为冷轧板或压铸产品中的常年宠儿。我们还喜欢将它涂在钢铁和其他工业金属上。一旦我们决定尽可能少地使用铅，锌就会作为一种安全、可靠的替代品介入。
The same electrical characteristics that protect the aforementioned propane tank make zinc a preferred component in alkaline batteries. We still use a lot of zinc-heavy brass, as it is easier to work and stronger than copper, while maintaining zinc’s magical corrosion-management characteristics. It’s useful in everything from cellular towers to plumbing to trombones. Zinc isn’t only fuss-free in merging with copper, making it a perennial favorite in products that are cold-rolled into sheets or die-cast. We also like to coat it on steel and other industrial metals. Once we decided we wanted as little to do with lead as possible, zinc stepped in as a safe, reliable substitute.
最大的用途——我们放了大约一半的锌——是在镀锌过程中，我们在其中添加了锌铜绿。这是一个特别的步骤有效保护金属免受天气和海水的腐蚀影响。这些用途几乎存在于您每天都能看到的所有金属中：车身、桥梁、护栏、铁丝网围栏、金属屋顶等。
The biggest use—where we put roughly half our zinc—is in galvanization processes where we add that zinc patina. It’s a step that is particularly effective at shielding metals from the corrosive effects of weather and seawater. Such uses are in pretty much all the metal you can see every day: car bodies, bridges, guardrails, chain-link fencing, metal roofs, and so on.
总的来说，锌是我们第四大最喜欢的金属，仅次于钢、铜和铝。在未来的几十年里，它将留在那个地方。
Altogether zinc is our fourth-favorite metal by use, behind only steel, copper, and aluminum. It will stay in that spot in the decades to come.
锌是非常可回收的。大约 30% 的锌生产来自回收材料，大约 80% 的锌能够进行二次利用。它是单独存在的，在世界许多地方也含有铅。中国当然是最大的生产国，但几乎所有的中国锌都用于其自身的最终消费。秘鲁、澳大利亚、印度、美国和墨西哥位列前六。其结果是一个来源广泛且广泛多样化的供应系统，以低于铜等知名金属的价格提供锌。在一个供应系统崩溃的世界里，至少我们还有锌。
Zinc is eminently recyclable. Roughly 30 percent of zinc production is from recycled material, with roughly 80 percent of all zinc capable of making a second go of it. It is found on its own, as well as with lead in many places around the world. China is the largest producer because of course it is, but almost all Chinese zinc is for its own end consumption. Peru, Australia, India, the United States, and Mexico round out the top six. The result is a supply system that is broadly sourced and broadly diversified, offering zinc at a lower price point than better-known metals such as copper. In a world of broken supply systems, at least we’ll still have zinc.
世界就是这样结束的
This Is How the World Ends
在骑士团成立期间——那是人类历史上空前、短暂但最重要的时刻——所有这些材料以及许许多多的材料都在一个基本上是自由和公平的全球市场上提供。它们的可用性不仅仅是我们现代生活的基础；这是一个良性循环。该秩序建立了稳定性，促进了经济增长，促进了技术进步，从而导致这些材料的可用性，从而使它们能够融入现代的产品、现代性和生活方式。
For the duration of the Order—that unprecedented, brief, but above all vital moment in human history—all these materials and so many, many more have been made available in a largely free-and-fair global market. Their availability isn’t simply what our modern life is built upon; it has been a virtuous circle. The Order established stability, which fostered economic growth, which enabled technological advancement, which led to the availability of these materials, which allowed their inclusion into the products, modernity, and lifestyle of the modern age.
在该命令中，关于材料准入的唯一竞争是市场准入。明令禁止入侵国家获取原材料。你只需要为他们付钱。因此，资本丰富的系统享有最好的准入。拥有超级金融模式的亚洲人有点被骗了，中国的超大型超级金融系统往往会吞噬一切。
In the Order the only competition over materials access was over market access. Invading countries for raw materials was expressly forbidden. You simply had to pay for them. Capital-rich systems, therefore, enjoyed the best access. The Asians with their hyperfinance model kind of cheated, with the Chinese ultramegahugehyperfinanced system tending to gobble up anything it could.
如果没有 Order 的规则和约束，单靠金钱是行不通的。
Without the rules and constraints of the Order in place, money on its own just isn’t going to cut it.
没有订单，一切都会放松。
Without the Order it all unwinds.
这比听起来要糟糕得多。
This is far worse than it sounds.
在过去 75 年的秩序中，对我们定义为现代生活至关重要的材料清单已经扩大了一个数量级以上。除了美国将保留对西半球和澳大利亚的完全访问权以及到达世界任何地方的军事能力外，没有人能够访问所有必要的材料。它们太分散，或者太集中。少数拥有当地存款或军队的国家可以尝试，但这是一个候选名单：英国、法国、土耳其、日本、俄罗斯。对于其他人来说，不仅要恢复到 1939 年之前普遍存在的经济和技术水平，而且要恢复到工业革命本身之前的水平，这是一个非常现实的风险。没有产业投入，就无法取得产业成果。出于必要，走私矿石、加工材料和/或成品将成为一项蓬勃发展的业务。
In the past seventy-five years of the Order, the list of materials critical to what we define as modern life has expanded by far more than an order of magnitude. With the exception of the United States, which will retain full access to the Western Hemisphere and Australia, as well as the military capacity to reach anywhere in the world, no one will be able to access all the necessary materials. They are simply too scattered or, alternatively, too concentrated. A few countries with local deposits or militaries with reach can try, but it is a short list: the United Kingdom, France, Turkey, Japan, and Russia. For the rest, there is a very real risk of reverting not simply to the economic and technological levels that pervaded before 1939, but to before the Industrial Revolution itself. If you lack the industrial inputs, you cannot achieve industrial outcomes. Smuggling of ores, processed materials, and/or finished products will, out of necessity, become a booming business.
这种权力下放的核心再次是美国的冷漠。美国人可以在没有大规模军事干预的情况下获得他们需要的东西。这不会导致大多数国家感到反感的那种美国大量介入，而是会让大多数国家感到恐惧的美国大规模脱离接触。如果全球超级大国参与其中，至少会有一些规则。相反，我们将进行不稳定的区域内竞争，美国人将在很大程度上拒绝参与。不稳定的竞争意味着不稳定的材料获取，这意味着不稳定的技术应用，这意味着不稳定的经济能力。我们完全有能力增加竞争和战争，同时也经历急剧的经济和技术衰退。
Central to this devolution, once again, is American disinterest. The Americans can access what they need without massive military interventions. This will generate not the sort of heavy American involvement most countries would find distasteful, but instead large-scale American disengagement that most countries will find terrifying. If the global superpower were involved, at least there would be some rules. Instead we will have erratic intra-regional competitions in which the Americans will largely decline participation. Erratic competition means erratic materials access, which means erratic technological application, which means erratic economic capacity. We are perfectly capable of having increased competition and warfare while also experiencing dramatic economic and technological declines.
所以这就是一切分崩离析的原因。现在让我们来看看我们如何可能——可能——将它们重新组合起来。
So this is how it all falls apart. Now let’s turn to how we might—might—put it all back together.
打造我们所知的世界
Crafting the World We Know
在全球化时代，2021 年是一个奇怪的年份。我们有短缺。一切。卫生纸。手机。木材。汽车。鳄梨。果汁盒。印刷这本书所需的纸张！
Calendar year 2021 was an odd one in the age of globalization. We had shortages. Of everything. Toilet tissue. Cellular phones. Lumber. Automobiles. Guacamole. Juice boxes. The paper needed to print this book!
这都是 COVID 的错。
It was all COVID’s fault.
每次我们封锁或开放时，我们都会改变我们消费的东西。在封锁期间，有更多的材料用于家庭装修和电子设备，所以我们有事可做。在开幕式中，更多的是假期和餐厅旅行。每一次转变都需要全球工业重组，以满足不断变化的需求状况。每次我们遇到新变种或新疫苗或新的反疫苗反弹时，我们的需求状况都会再次发生变化。我们需求状况的每一次变化都需要一年的时间才能自行解决。
Every time we had a lockdown or an opening, we changed what we consumed. In lockdown it was more materials for home improvements and electronic gear so we’d have something to do. In openings it was more vacations and restaurant trips. Each shift necessitated global industrial retoolings to meet the changed demand profile. Each time we got hit with a new variant or a new vaccine or a new anti-vax backlash, our demand profile changed again. Each change in our demand profile took a year to work itself out.
这并不愉快，与即将发生的事情相比，这算不了什么。2021 年供应链的痛苦主要是关于需求激增。相反，去全球化将在供应不稳定的情况下击败我们。
It was not enjoyable, and it is nothing compared to what’s coming. The supply chain agony of 2021 was primarily about whiplashing demand. Deglobalization will instead beat us about the head and shoulders with instability in supply.
考虑一个“简单”示例中的漏洞：蓝色牛仔裤。
Consider the vulnerabilities within a “simple” example: blue jeans.
截至 2022 年，美国最大的牛仔布供应商是中国、墨西哥和孟加拉国。退后一步，织物很可能是在西班牙、土耳其或突尼斯使用德国开发和制造的化学品染色的。这更不用说牛仔布的纱线来自哪里。那将是印度或中国或美国或乌兹别克斯坦或巴西。更进一步，棉花可能来自中国、乌兹别克斯坦、阿塞拜疆或贝宁。
As of 2022, the largest suppliers of denim to the United States are China, Mexico, and Bangladesh. Go back a step and the fabric was likely dyed in Spain or Turkey or Tunisia using chemicals developed and manufactured in Germany. This is to say nothing of where the yarn for the denim cloth comes from. That would be India or China or the United States or Uzbekistan or Brazil. Go a step further back and the cotton was probably sourced from China or Uzbekistan or Azerbaijan or Benin.
但故事并未就此停止或开始。您最喜欢的那双鞋背后的设计工作可能发生在美国、法国、意大利或日本 。. . 尽管许多后起之秀的国家都在展示他们的设计才华。尤其是孟加拉国正在参与脑力劳动。
But the story doesn’t stop—or begin—there. The design work behind your favorite pair likely occurred in the United States, France, Italy, or Japan . . . although many up-and-coming countries are showcasing their design talents. Bangladesh in particular is getting in on the brain work.
当然，牛仔裤不仅仅是牛仔面料、颜色和款式。还有铜和锌铆钉和纽扣。他们可能来自德国、土耳其或墨西哥（尽管老实说，这种东西可能来自任何地方）。锻造这些明亮钻头所需的矿石可能来自巴西、秘鲁、纳米比亚、澳大利亚或中国的矿山。拉链呢？如果你想要一个不会阻碍的人，日本是首选。三个猜测容易发生障碍的地方来自哪里。然后是线程，即 phbbbbt。. . 可能来自印度或巴基斯坦，但这是另一种来自耸肩无处不在的产品。最后，还有工人们缝制“made in”标签的地方。通常，实际上什么都没有做那里。这更像是组装的事情。在至少十个国家/地区，平均每条牛仔裤都被人用手触摸过。上帝保佑你禁止使用床头灯在你的屁股上放闪闪发光的碎片——这个小玩意儿的输入系统实际上涉及太空旅行。
Of course there’s more to jeans than denim fabric and colors and styles. There are also copper and zinc rivets and buttons. They’re probably from Germany or Turkey or Mexico (although, honestly, that sort of stuff can come from anywhere). The ore required to forge those bright bits is probably sourced from mines in Brazil, Peru, Namibia, Australia, or, again, China. What about zippers? Japan is the go-to if you want one that won’t snag. Three guesses where the snag-prone ones come from. Then there’s thread, which phbbbbt . . . probably comes from India or Pakistan, but that’s another one of those products sourced from shoulder-shrugging ubiquity. Finally, there’s the location where workers sew on the “made in” tag. Typically, nothing is actually made there. It’s more an assembly thing. The average pair of jeans is touched by hands in at least ten countries. And God forbid you use a bedazzler to put sparkly bits on your ass—the input system for that little gadget practically involves space travel.
如果你想获得真正的技术，所有这些都只是“面向客户”的一面。缝纫机不会自然而然地冒出地球。他们使用来自世界各地的铜、钢、齿轮和塑料。穿梭在这一切周围的船只也是如此。
If you want to get really technical, all this is just the “customer facing” side. Sewing machines don’t just pop up naturally out of the earth. They use copper and steel and gears and plastics sourced the world over. Same for the ships that shuttle all this about.
那是用布做的东西，除了披在你的框架上之外什么都不用做。普通的计算机有一万个部件，其中一些本身由数百个组件组成。现代制造业近乎疯狂。我对这个部门了解得越多，我就越不确定它位于边界的哪一边。现代制造业极易受到疾病可能产生的每一次破坏的各个方面的影响。
And that’s for something made out of cloth that doesn’t have to do anything more than be draped across your frame. The average computer has ten thousand pieces, some of which are themselves made out of hundreds of components. Modern manufacturing is borderline insane. The more I learn about the sector, the less sure I am as to which side of the border it resides. Modern manufacturing is eminently vulnerable to every facet of every disruption the Disorder is capable of generating.
使这一切成为可能的技术术语是“中间产品贸易”。从字面上看，这是给定物理形式的全球化。
The technical term for what has made all this and so much more possible is “intermediate goods trade.” It is quite literally globalization given physical form.
从历史上看，中间产品贸易是一个很大的禁忌。这需要一些拆包。
Historically speaking, intermediate goods trade was a big no-no. That requires some unpacking.
再一次，让我们从头开始。
Once again, let’s start at the beginning.
从头开始
STARTING FROM SCRATCH
第一对有意义的制造技术是任何玩过席德梅尔文明的人都非常熟悉的技术：陶器和铜。烧制的陶器使我们能够在歉收季节储存收成，而铜是我们能够锻造成工具的第一种金属——第一种工具是帮助我们收割小麦的镰刀。锻造这副产品所需的设备并不是特别繁重。粘土可以用手塑造（如果你特别喜欢，也可以用陶轮），而铜可以从矿石中熔炼，如果它在陶罐中加热，你猜对了。获得铜金属后，只需用石头将其敲打成您认为相关的任何形状即可。早期的制造在退休人员的陶艺班上不会觉得不合适。
The first pair of meaningful manufacturing technologies are ones that anyone who has played Sid Meier’s Civilization knows all too well: pottery and copper. Fired pottery enabled us to store our harvest for the lean seasons, while copper is the first metal we were able to forge into tools—the first of which were sickles to help us harvest wheat. The equipment required to forge this pair of products isn’t particularly onerous. Clay can be shaped by hand (or with a pottery wheel if you’re extra fancy), whereas copper can be smelted from ore if it is heated in, you guessed it, a clay pot. Once you’ve got your copper metal, it’s simply a matter of beating it—with a rock—into whatever shape you find relevant. Early manufacturing wouldn’t have felt all that out of place at a retiree pottery class.
一点一点地，我们在加工材料和率先使用新材料方面都做得更好。铜镰刀让位于青铜镰刀。陶罐让位于陶瓷。青铜长矛让位于铁剑。木制杯子让位于玻璃瓶。羊毛线让位于棉布。但在某种程度上，从文明的黎明到 1700 年代的一切都有一个共同的特征：组织简单。
Bit by bit we got better both at working materials and at pioneering the use of new ones. Copper sickles gave way to bronze scythes. Clay pots gave way to ceramics. Bronze spears gave way to iron swords. Wooden mugs gave way to glass bottles. Wool thread gave way to cotton cloth. But in a way, everything from the dawn of civilization right up to the 1700s shared a certain characteristic: organizational simplicity.
没有 Home Depot 可以（反复）跑去采购零件。大多数东西都是你自己做的。如果你幸运的话，你有一个铁匠邻居，但即使是他的供应系统也不能与复杂性相混淆。那是一个家伙，一个锻炉，一把锤子，一些钳子和一桶水。如果他着眼于未来，他有一个助手和一个徒弟。. . 就是这样。这种家庭手工业面临着极端的局限性。像他们这样的铁匠和技术人员不能只是去城镇广场招募劳动力；他们必须训练它。多年来。_ 没有快速的技术进步。没有快速的能力建设。
There was no Home Depot to run to (repeatedly) to source parts. Most things you made yourself. If you were lucky, you had a blacksmith neighbor, but even his supply system couldn’t be confused with complexity. It was one dude, a forge, a hammer, some tongs, and a barrel of water. If he had an eye for the future, he had an assistant and an apprentice . . . and that was about it. Such cottage industries faced extreme limitations. Blacksmiths and skilled folks like them couldn’t just go out to the town square and recruit labor; they had to train it. For years. There was no rapid technological progress. There were no rapid capacity buildouts.
工业革命以三种关键方式改变了数学。
The Industrial Revolution changed the math in three critical ways.
首先，工业革命不仅给了我们钢铁——比铁更不易碎、更易加工和更耐用——它还给了我们大量的钢铁，这样工人们就可以不用锻造就可以获得原材料它自己。解决了这个混乱、昂贵、危险的步骤后，技术工人可以专注于增加价值和进一步专业化。人类历史上第一次，多个领域的专家可以进行有意义的合作。互动带来进步。
First, the Industrial Revolution not only gifted us with steel—less brittle, more workable and durable than iron—it gifted us with huge volumes of steel so that workers could access the raw metal without having to forge it themselves. With that messy, expensive, dangerous step taken care of, skilled workers could focus on adding value and specializing further. For the first time in human history, specialists in multiple fields could meaningfully collaborate. Interaction brought advancement.
其次，工业革命给我们带来了工具和模具的精密制造。家庭手工业的主要缺点之一是没有两个部分是完全相同的，因此没有两个成品是完全相同的。如果有什么东西坏了，就不会插入替换件。要么整个项目必须被扔掉，要么需要被带到一个熟练的铁匠那里来制作一个全新的、定制的零件。在战争中，这尤其烦人。火枪虽然很棒，但如果有一个部件出现故障，你就会得到一根昂贵、质量低劣的棍棒。精度的提高最终解决了这个限制。现在相同的零件可以由十几个来制造。或千。在人类历史上，制造业第一次有了规模。
Second, the Industrial Revolution brought us precision manufacturing, both in tools and molds. One of the major drawbacks of cottage industry is that no two parts are exactly the same, so no two finished products are exactly the same. If something breaks, there is no plugging in a replacement piece. Either the entire item had to be chucked or it needed to be taken to a skilled smith to craft a fundamentally new, customized part. In war this was particularly annoying. Muskets were great and all, but if a single piece malfunctioned you were left with an expensive, low-quality club. Advancements in precision did an end run around this restriction. Now identical parts could be made by the dozen. Or thousand. For the first time in human history, manufacturing had scale.
第三，工业革命给我们带来了化石燃料。我们已经介绍了它们在发电方面的作用，并使我们能够超越肌肉和水，但石油和煤炭的作用远不止于此。这对“动力燃料”的衍生物通常与能量毫无关系：油漆、颜料、抗生素、溶剂、止痛药、尼龙、清洁剂、玻璃、墨水、化肥和塑料。在人类历史上，我们第一次没有像从青铜到铁那样向前迈出“微小”的一步；相反，我们经历了材料科学应用的爆炸式增长。
Third, the Industrial Revolution brought us fossil fuels. We’ve already covered their role in generating power and enabling us to move beyond muscle and water, but there is far more to oil and coal than that. Derivatives of the pair of “power fuels” often have nothing to do with energy at all: paints, pigments, antibiotics, solvents, painkillers, nylon, detergents, glass, inks, fertilizers, and plastics. For the first time in human history, we didn’t take a “minor” step forward as we did from bronze to iron; we instead experienced an explosion in materials science applications.
这三项改进非常吻合。如果技术工人不需要掌握每一步，他们可以真正擅长一两个步骤。砰！越来越多样化的技能组合和越来越复杂的产品。将这种超级技能应用到更大规模，几乎任何产品都可以大规模生产。砰！装配线、机械、汽车和电话。将这些概念应用到数十种新材料中，整个人类状况就会得到重塑。砰！现代医学、高楼大厦、先进农业。综合起来，这三项改进——专业化、规模化和产品覆盖面——改变了可能性的数学，让我们第一次真正瞥见了我们今天所认识的制造业。
The three improvements dovetail nicely. If skilled workers don’t need to master every single step, they can get really good at one or two. Bam! Increasingly diverse skill sets and increasingly complex products. Apply that hyperskill capacity to a larger scale and nearly any product can be produced en masse. Bam! Assembly lines, machinery, automobiles, and telephones. Apply those concepts to dozens of new materials and the entirety of the human condition is remade. Bam! Modern medicine, high-rise cities, advanced agriculture. Taken together, these three improvements—in specialization, in scale, and in product reach—changed the math of the possible, and gave us our first real glimpse of what we today recognize as manufacturing.
仍然有很多限制。并非每个地方都有优质煤炭或优质铁矿石或所有其他工业投入品。贸易仍然是一项可疑的业务。如果你依赖外国主权来获得你需要的东西，那不仅仅是你为了获得必要的投入而信任他或她；这甚至不是一直信任他或她。这是关于你一直信任所有外国主权。任何可以进入任何供应链任何部分的力量都可能破坏整个供应链，而且通常是在不经意间。出于必要性和实用性，所有类型的制造都在内部进行。
There were still plenty of limitations. Not every place had good coal or good iron ore or all the other industrial inputs. And trade remained a dubious business. If you were dependent upon a foreign sovereign for something you needed, it wasn’t simply about you trusting him or her in order to get the necessary inputs; it wasn’t even about trusting him or her all the time. It was about you trusting all foreign sovereigns all the time. Any power that could reach into any part of any supply chain could wreck the whole thing, often inadvertently. Out of necessity and practicality, all manufacturing of all types was kept in-house.
这自然有利于某些地区。一个熟练的劳动力不可能实现规模经济。工业化促进了工业工厂的发展，这些工厂将 (a) 通过让每个工人专注于特定任务或零件，使熟练工人能够成倍努力，以及 (b) 使非熟练工人能够进入并在装配线上工作。
That naturally benefited certain geographies. Economies of scale are impossible with a skilled labor force of one. Industrialization enabled the development of industrial plants that would (a) enable skilled labor to multiply their efforts by having each worker specialize on a specific task or part, and (b) enable unskilled labor to come in and work the assembly lines.
随着工业密码被破解，问题变成了：这个工业厂房能建多大？技术工人能变得多专业？您可以在自己的系统内访问多少领土和人口？为了解决这个问题，旧的交通数学发挥了作用。任何可以在前工业时代穿梭货物和人的地理环境现在都可以穿梭于中间产品之间。除了所有其他优势之外，拥有良好内部地理环境的帝国体系现在可以产生制造业，实现其他人只能梦想的规模经济。
With the industrial code cracked, the questions became: How big could that industrial plant get? Just how specialized could the skilled workers become? How much territory and population could you access within your own system? In sussing that out, the old math of transport came into play. Any geography that could shuttle goods and people about in the preindustrial age could now shuttle about intermediate goods. In addition to all their other advantages, the imperial systems with good internal geographies could now generate manufacturing, enabling economies of scale that others could only dream of.
第一个真正的大赢家是英国的运河，其次是德国的鲁尔河谷，最后是美国的钢铁带。不出所料，这些工业中心之间的经济竞争是 1850 年至 1945 年间地缘政治博弈的核心。
The first really big winner was canaled Britain, followed by Germany’s Ruhr Valley and ultimately the American Steel Belt. Unsurprisingly, the economic competition among these centers of industry was central to games geopolitical between 1850 and 1945.
但与英国、德国和美国的体系一样庞大和重要，地缘政治将它们的规模经济限制在自己的边界内。直到第二次世界大战结束，整个地球才合并为一个系统，并将全球海洋转变为一条巨大的安全、可航行的水道。美国保证所有国际商业的安全，并防止联盟成员相互开战或拥有殖民帝国并向所有感兴趣的各方开放美国消费市场，这些国家甚至从未想过会突然实现工业化。突然间，受地理青睐的“安全”地点不得不与迄今为止落后的、未工业化的地点展开竞争。
But as big and important as the British, German, and American systems were, geopolitics restricted their economies of scale to within their own borders. It took the end of World War II to merge the entire planet into a single system and transform the global ocean into one gigantic safe, navigable waterway. With the United States guaranteeing security for all international commerce and preventing the alliance members from either going to war with one another or having colonial empires and opening the American consumer market to all interested parties, countries that could have never even dreamed of industrializing suddenly could. All at once, the “safe” locations favored by geography had to compete with heretofore backward, unindustrialized locations.
规则改变了。制造业随着他们而改变。一套新的标准定义了成功。
The rules changed. Manufacturing changed with them. A new set of criteria defined success.
它是如何工作的，为什么它会工作
HOW IT WORKS, WHY IT WORKS
经济发展变化无常的事情之一是每个人的过程都不一样。英国第一，法国和低地国家并列第二，德国第三，美国大约第四，其次是日本。但由于所涉及的技术在不断发展，即使在第一批大批量产品中，路径也有所不同。英国的进程很慢，因为英国人在进行过程中实际上是在编造东西。
One of the fickle things about economic development is that the process isn’t the same for everyone. Britain was first, France and the Low Countries mushed together in second place, Germany was third, America roughly fourth, followed by Japan. But because the technologies involved are constantly evolving, even among this first broad batch the paths differed. Britain’s process was slow because the Brits were literally making things up as they went along.
德国的发展速度要快得多，这不仅仅是因为英国人好心为他人开辟了道路。德国存在于地缘政治压力锅中，周围环绕着战略和经济竞争对手。更糟糕的是，德国在莱茵河、多瑙河、威悉河、易北河和奥得河上的可居住土地充其量只是松散地连接在一起。德国更稳固的邻国很容易将其分裂。如果德国不能将每一个经济发展过程推向极限，它就会不堪重负。因此，1800 年代末和 1900 年代初的德国工业化经历绝对是疯狂的。
Germany’s development was far quicker, and not simply because the Brits were kind enough to blaze the path for others. Germany exists in a geopolitical pressure cooker, ringed by strategic and economic competitors. Even worse, the habitable bits of German lands on the Rhine, Danube, Weser, Elbe, and Oder Rivers are—at best—loosely connected. It’s easy for Germany’s more consolidated neighbors to split it apart. If Germany fails to press every economic development process to the limit, it is overwhelmed. So the German industrialization experience of the late 1800s and early 1900s was absolutely frenetic.
在资本生成和供应链建立方面，德国也比英国拥有一些显着的地理优势。德国的河流系统——尤其是德国西部的莱茵河-鲁尔河系统——是世界上最密集的自然通航水道网络。它非常适合工业化。特别是，鲁尔区拥有欧洲最好的一些煤矿（而且没有那些讨厌的水如此阻碍英国人的表格问题）。加起来，德国的工业化不是曲折的，而是紧张的，我想有人在跟着我慢跑。
Germany also had some significant geographic advantages over the Brits when it came to capital generation and supply chain establishment. The German river system—in particular the Rhine-Ruhr system of western Germany—is the densest network of naturally navigable waterways in the world. It is perfect for industrialization. In particular, the Ruhr region had some of Europe’s best coal deposits (and none of those pesky water table problems that so hindered the Brits). Add it up and German industrialization was less a meander and more a nervous, I-think-someone-is-following-me jog.
另一方面，美国人的进程要慢得多——几乎和英国人一样慢——但出于截然不同的原因。虽然德国工业化进程直到 1830 年代才真正开始，但真正激烈的部分是在 1880 年到 1915 年之间，还不到人的一生。在美国，这一过程的开始——铁路时代的开始——同样发生在 1830 年，但美国城市直到19世纪 30 年代才完全工业化，而美国乡村直到1960 年代才完全工业化. 在很多方面，美国的经历与德国的相反：没有地缘政治压力，所以没有必要加快速度，虽然德国人的工业、河流和人口足迹非常密集，但美国人都是无序分布的出去。美国的可用土地面积大约是第一次世界大战前德国可用土地面积的 25 倍，而美国人在二战之前没有任何类似于国家产业政策的东西。
On the flip side, the Americans’ process was far slower—nearly as slow as the Brits’—but for wildly different reasons. While the German industrialization process didn’t really get going until the 1830s, the really intense part was between 1880 and 1915, well under a human lifetime. In the United States the beginning of the process—the start of the railroad era—was similarly in 1830, but American cities were not fully industrialized until the 1930s, and the American countryside not until the 1960s. In many ways the American experience was an inverse image of the German one: there was no geopolitical pressure, so no need to speed things along, and while the Germans had a very dense industrial, riverine, and population footprint, the Americans were all sprawled out. The useful lands of the United States are about twenty-five times the area of the useful lands of pre–World War I Germany, and the Americans didn’t have anything resembling a state industrial policy until they were in World War II.
对于美国人来说，一切都是——一切一直都是——相当la-di-da。
For the Americans, everything is—everything has always been—rather la-di-da.
日本是第一轮的后来者，直到 1868 年的明治维新打破了旧的封建秩序才真正获得牵引力，但与德国人一样，日本人出于必要迅速领先。本土群岛几乎没有任何可以想象到的原材料，无论是石油还是铝土矿，因此日本别无选择，只能建立一个帝国以确保工业化所需的材料。因为那意味着要拿别人的东西，日本人别无选择，只能迅速行动。
Japan was a latecomer to the first round, not really gaining traction until the Meiji Restoration of 1868 gutted the old feudal order, but like the Germans, the Japanese shot ahead quickly out of necessity. The Home Islands are poor in pretty much every imaginable raw material, whether oil or bauxite, so Japan had no choice but to forge an empire in order to secure the materials required for industrialization. Since that meant taking other people’s stuff, the Japanese had no choice but to move very quickly.
朝鲜人是日本扩张的早期受害者，在广岛和长崎原子弹爆炸之前一直处于殖民状态。然后，他们继续成为骑士团最热情的参与者之一，成为工业化第二次大浪潮的先锋。他们的产业化道路最好定义为惊慌失措的冲刺。即使在今天，韩国人也迫切希望保护他们的主权免受所有的东西都是日本的。韩国人是缺乏足够大的干船坞来建造超级油轮的人，所以他们把船分成两半，然后在两半周围建造干船坞来完成这个项目。
The Koreans were early victims of the Japanese expansion and remained colonized until the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings freed them. They then went on to be among the Order’s most enthusiastic participants, becoming the vanguard of industrialization’s second major wave. Their industrialization path can best be defined as a panicky sprint. The Koreans—even today—are desperate to protect their sovereignty from all things Japanese. The Koreans are the people who lacked a sufficiently large drydock to build a supertanker, so they built the ship in halves and then built the drydock around the halves to finish the project.
东南亚国家包罗万象。出于类似的原因，新加坡走上了近乎韩国的道路，马来西亚扮演了日本恶棍的角色。越南将政治统一置于经济发展之上，因此直到 1990 年代仍处于前工业化和贫穷状态。. . 除非你在胡志明市（又名西贡），在这种情况下，你在一个世纪前就因法国资本而工业化了。即使在 2022 年，越南也不像两个不同的国家，而更像是两个不同的星球。泰国在历史上对其击退入侵者的能力更有信心（该国的核心被丛林山脉环绕），在节奏和结果方面介于两者之间。
The Southeast Asian states run the gamut. Singapore followed a nearly Korean path for similar reasons, with the part of the Japanese villain being played by Malaysia. Vietnam prioritized political unity over economic development and so remained preindustrialized and poor until the 1990s . . . unless you’re in Ho Chi Minh City (aka Saigon), in which case you were industrialized a century ago courtesy of French capital. Even in 2022, Vietnam feels less like two different countries and more like two different planets. Thailand, far more historically confident in its ability to repel invaders (the country’s core is ringed by jungle mountains), lies somewhere between both in terms of pacing and outcome.
这种对经济理论实际结果的小转移的意义在于，并不是每个人都处于同一水平，从发展的角度来看，甚至不是以同样的速度前进。这可能很糟糕，因为走得更远的国家往往在生产力、财富和多样化方面对其经济体系更具吸引力，并且可以利用这种魅力来支配不太先进的体系。欢迎来到新殖民主义或其他殖民主义。
The point of this little diversion into the practical outcomes of economic theory is that not everyone is at the same level, developmentally speaking, or even proceeding at the same pace. This can be awful, in that countries that are further along tend to have more oomph to their economic systems in terms of productivity, wealth, and diversification and can use that oomph to lord over less advanced systems. Welcome to colonialism, neo- or otherwise.
但这种差异也可能很大，因为如果宏观战略环境不允许传统的殖民主义——比如美国主导的全球秩序——那么制造业整合就会有激烈的争论。
But this differentiation can also be great, in that if the macrostrategic environment doesn’t allow traditional colonialism—like, say, the American-led global Order—there are hefty arguments to be made for manufacturing integration.
在改变秩序的地缘战略环境和集装箱航运的兴起之间，自时间黎明以来一直阻碍有意义的跨境整合的安全和成本问题终于得到解决。
Between the changed geostrategic environment of the Order and the rise of containerized shipping, the security and cost concerns that had prevented meaningful cross-border integration since the dawn of time had finally unclenched.
在任何一件以上的制成品中，都有提高效率的机会。拿一些非常简单的东西：木台面。有锥形的多刺的东西和棒状的纺锤体，通常粘在一起。虽然期望锥体和杆由同一个木工制作是合理的，但说木工可能不是做胶水。两种不同的技能组合。两个不同的价位。油漆说顶部，我们已经达到三个。
In any manufactured product that has more than one piece, there are opportunities for efficiencies. Take something really simple: a wooden top. There’s the conical spinny thing and the rodlike spindle, typically glued together. While it is reasonable to expect the cone and the rod to be fashioned by the same woodworker, said woodworker probably didn’t make the glue. Two different skill sets. Two different price points. Paint said top and we’re already up to three.
将专业化的基本概念应用到手机上：显示屏幕。电池。变压器。接线。传感器。相机。调制解调器。数据处理器。片上系统。（最后一个是一个奇特的小装置，包括一个视频处理器、一个显示处理器、一个图形处理器和手机的中央处理器。）没有人会期望一个工人能够完成所有这些。对于片上系统来说是四倍。没有人会期望插入技术含量相对较低的线路的工人与微调传感器的工人获得相同的报酬。想象一下，如果所有的作品都是在日本制造的，日本是一个人均收入约为 41,000 美元的国家。那个片上系统会很飞——它应该是的，日本人擅长复杂的微电子工作——但想想可能会有一些日本人喜欢运行注塑模具系统来制造手机壳，每小时一美元。这就像 Lady Gaga 给四岁的孩子教钢琴课。她能做到吗？当然。我打赌她会做得很好。但是没有人会因为她的一个小时的麻烦而付给她五十格兰德。*廉价、神圣不可侵犯的运输和几乎无穷无尽的劳动力多样性相结合，使制造商能够将他们的供应链分成更复杂、更离散的步骤。
Apply that basic concept of specialization to a cell phone: Display screen. Battery. Transformer. Wiring. Sensors. Camera. Modem. Data processor. System on a Chip. (That last is a fancy little gadget that includes a video processor, a display processor, a graphics processor, and the phone’s central processing unit.) Nobody would expect one worker to be able to make all of it. Quadruply so for the System on a Chip. Nobody would expect the worker who plugs in the relatively low-tech wiring to be compensated at the same rate as the worker who fine-tunes the sensors. Imagine if all the pieces were made in Japan, a country with a per capita income of some $41,000. That System on a Chip would be pretty fly—and it should be, the Japanese excel at complex microelectronic work—but it stretches the mind to think there might be some Japanese dude who loves to run an injection mold system to make phone cases for a dollar an hour. It would be like Lady Gaga teaching piano lessons to four-year-olds. Could she do it? Certainly. I bet she’d do great. But no one is going to pay her fifty grand for an hour of her trouble.* The combination of cheap, sacrosanct shipping and nearly endless workforce variety enabled manufacturers to split apart their supply chains into ever more complex, more discrete steps.
如果你要追踪汽车的完整供应链，你需要比我更多的预算，但这是简短的版本：
If you were to trace the full supply chain of a car, you’d need a bigger budget than I have, but here’s the short version:
包括铂、铬和铝在内的金属、缠绕和焊接的电线、完整的诊断和性能增强计算机系统、轮胎橡胶、石油制成的合成织物、内饰塑料、玻璃和镜子、齿轮和活塞、滚珠轴承，和注塑成型的按钮，可以将收音机一直调到 11。每一个，以及进入收音机的三万个其他部件中的每一个我没有列出的标准乘用车，有自己高度定制的劳动力和自己的供应链。每个零件都要由自己的劳动力组装成一个中间产品（空调、发动机、照明等），再由自己的劳动力组装成另一个中间产品（仪表盘、车架），如此循环往复直到整个混乱的东西到达最后组装。美国汽车制造商福特的供应链是现有公司中最复杂的，它利用了 60 多个国家和 1,300家直接供应商，这些供应商总共拥有 4,400 多个制造基地。*
Metals including platinum and chrome and aluminum, wrapped and soldered wires, a full diagnostic and performance-enhancing computer system, rubber for the tires, synthetic fabrics made from petroleum, plastics for the interior, glass and mirrors, gears and pistons, ball bearings, and injection-molded buttons to turn the radio all the way up to 11. Each of these, and each of the thirty thousand other parts that go into a standard passenger vehicle I didn’t list, has its own highly customized workforce and its own supply chain. Each part has to be assembled into an intermediate product (air-conditioning, engine, lighting, etc.) by its own workforce, and then assembled into another intermediate product (dashboard, car frame) by its own workforce, and on and on until the whole mess of stuff reaches final assembly. The supply chains of U.S. auto maker Ford are among the most complex of any firm in existence, tapping more than sixty countries and 1,300 direct suppliers that together have more than 4,400 manufacturing sites.*
每一步都需要扩大投入。在每一步，输入流的分化都会扩大。在每一步，对支持基础设施的需求都在扩大。每一步都需要石油来为一切提供燃料。在整个 1950 年代、1960 年代、1970 年代和 80 年代，所有这一切都零星地发生在美国人与其核心冷战盟友之间，但随着冷战的结束，差异化的范围真正变得全球化，并且步伐加快到闪电般的速度。
At each step the need for inputs expands. At each step the differentiation of the input stream expands. At each step the demand for supporting infrastructure expands. At each step the need for petroleum to fuel everything expands. All this occurred in bits and pieces between the Americans and their core Cold War allies throughout the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, but with the Cold War’s end the scope for the differentiation became truly global and the pace accelerated to lightning speeds.
现在，这种复杂性和价值的增加在每一种制成品中都体现出来了。因此，在 1996 年之后的 20 年里——包括经济大衰退在内——全球海运贸易量翻了一番，价值翻了三倍。到那个时候，贸易需要五千年才能建立起来。
Such increases in complexity and value now play out across every manufactured product. Consequently, in the twenty years following 1996—a period that includes the Great Recession—global maritime trade doubled by volume and tripled by value. Trade that to that point had required five millennia to build.
在冷战后的全球化世界中，一切都不仅仅是变得更大；一切也变得更快了。
Everything didn’t simply get bigger in the post–Cold War globalized world; everything got faster as well.
准时制
JUST-IN-TIME
就在 20 世纪 70 年代，获取中间产品的唯一途径是大宗采购。在糟糕的前集装箱时代，不仅运输成本更高，而且在组织上也很笨拙。购买之间的时间会延长，因此一次购买很多并保持仓库更划算。存储不会便宜，但它比支付大量受不稳定的交货时间表困扰的小订单要便宜。更重要的是，所有这些库存都是必要的，以防止不可想象的事情发生：因为你用完了一个特定的小部件而不得不停止生产。
As recently as the 1970s, about the only way to source intermediate goods was via bulk purchases. In the bad ol’ pre-container days, not only was shipping more expensive, it was organizationally clumsy. Time would stretch out between purchases, so it was more cost-effective to purchase a lot at once and maintain a warehouse. Storage wouldn’t be cheap, but it would be cheaper than paying for lots of small orders beset by erratic delivery schedules. More important, all that inventory was necessary to prevent the unthinkable: having to halt production because you ran out of a specific widget.
集装箱化通过使运输更可靠，使公司能够将库存推回到船上，并使较小的订单能够以更合理的成本生产而改变了数学。丰田尤其意识到，随着运输规范的改变，制造可以从大批量模式发展为更加稳定的产品流。这种新的“及时”库存系统允许公司提前一个月订购几天供应的小部件，这些新鲜供应恰好在他们最后的订单用完时到达。
Containerization changed the math by making shipping more reliable, enabling firms to push their inventorying back onto vessels, and enabling smaller orders to be produced at more reasonable costs. Toyota in particular realized that with changed shipping norms, manufacturing could evolve from a big-batch model to more of a steady product stream. This new “just-in-time” inventorying system allows firms to place orders for a few-day supply of widgets as little as a month in advance, with those fresh supplies arriving just as their last orders are running out.
这些系统的存在有几个原因。
These systems exist for a few reasons.
最重要的是帮助企业现金流。简而言之，公司持有的库存越少，在任何给定时间占用的现金就越少，从而使公司能够用节省下来的钱做其他事情：有用的投资、产能扩张、劳动力培训、研发等。从这个角度来看，考虑 iPhone。2020 年，苹果售出了 9000 万部 iPhone。通过准时制每单位仅节省 1 美分的成本，加起来就可以节省 100 万美元。仅在 2004 日历年，仅对美国公司而言，此类库存节省每年就达到 80-900亿美元。
The most important is to help companies with cash flow. Put simply, the less inventory a company holds, the less cash is tied up at any given time, enabling firms to do other things with the savings: useful investments, capacity expansion, workforce training, R&D, etc. To put this in perspective, consider the iPhone. In 2020, Apple sold 90 million iPhones. A cost savings of just a penny a unit via just-in-time would add up to a cool $1 million savings. In just calendar year 2004 for just U.S. firms, such inventory savings amounted to $80–90 billion annually.
在全球化系统中，供应链不仅仅是实现规模经济；它们是关于将每个部分和流程与最有效地处理工作的经济和劳动力相匹配，所有这些都在最短的时间内完成。使现代计算、电话和电子技术成为可能的众多因素之一是世界上充斥着处于不同发展阶段的劳动力和经济，同时宏观战略环境使所有这些不同的系统能够和平、顺畅地相互作用。
In a globalized system, supply chains are not simply about achieving economies of scale; they are about matching each part and process to an economy and workforce that handle the work most efficiently, all in the shortest possible amount of time. One of the many things that makes modern computing and telephony and electronics possible is that the world is awash with workforces and economies at different stages of the development path while at the same time the macrostrategic environment enables all those various systems to interact peaceably and smoothly.
准时制是人类生产足够的剩余食品来支持可以专业化的人的合乎逻辑的结论，比如那个曾经非常重要的铁匠。就像一般的中间制成品贸易一样，这之所以成为可能，只是因为全球运输系统变得如此可靠。
Just-in-time is the logical conclusion of humanity producing sufficient surplus foodstuffs to support people who could specialize, like that once-all-important blacksmith. And like intermediate manufactures trade in general, it is possible only because the global transport system has become so reliable.
这就是方式和原因。让我们谈谈在哪里。
So that’s the how and the why. Let’s talk about the where.
现在的地图
The Map of the Present
全球化人格化：东亚制造业
GLOBALIZATION PERSONIFIED: MANUFACTURING IN EAST ASIA
首先，东亚是制造业的中心，主要是因为订单。
First up, East Asia is the hub for manufacturing work, largely because of the Order.
一旦美国人让海洋变得自由和安全，运输成本就会迅速下降，以至于制造公司不仅搬迁到大城市或旧的以河流为基础的循环系统之外；至少有一部分他们完全迁移到了主要经济体之外。任何可以建设港口和一些周边基础设施的国家都可以参与低技能、低附加值制造业、加工食品和生产纺织品、水泥、廉价电子产品和玩具的世界，同时建设他们的工业厂房和技能组合. 添加容器化，这个过程开始加速。在 1969 年，即从日本到加利福尼亚的集装箱服务的第一个全年，日本对美国的出口增长了近四分之一。
Once the Americans made the seas free and safe for all, transport costs dropped so quickly that manufacturing companies didn’t just relocate outside the major cities or the old river-based circulatory systems; at least in part they relocated outside the major economies altogether. Any country that could build a port and some surrounding infrastructure could participate in the world of low-skill, low-value-added manufacturing, processing foods and producing textiles, cement, cheap electronics, and toys while building out their industrial plant and skill sets. Add in containerization and the process kicked into high gear. In calendar year 1969, the first full year of container service from Japan to California, Japanese exports to the United States increased by nearly a quarter.
亚洲人将西方消费视为他们通往稳定和财富的途径，并围绕以出口为基础的制造业重塑了他们的经济和社会规范。日本走在了这一进程的前列，但台湾、韩国、东南亚和中国紧随其后。数十年的出口、增长和稳定使这些参与者中的大多数能够稳步攀升到价值链的顶端。例如，日本从生产廉价立体声音响*到生产一些最先进的工业音响世界上的技术。台湾是塑料玩具的发源地，但现在生产世界上最先进的电脑芯片。中国在世纪之交才真正进入这种组合，但它确实引起了轰动。中国拥有比其他亚洲参与者更便宜的国内运输、更多资源可投入经济以及比亚洲其他国家加起来还要大的劳动力基础。
The Asians perceived Western consumption as their path to stability and wealth, and all reforged their economic and social norms around export-based manufacturing. Japan vanguarded the process, but it didn’t take long for Taiwan, South Korea, Southeast Asia, and China to follow. Decades of exports, growth, and stability enabled most of these players to climb steadily up the value chain. Japan, for example, went from producing cheap stereos* to producing some of the most advanced industrial technology in the world. Taiwan was the original land of plastic toys but now makes the world’s most advanced computer chips. China only really entered this mix at the turn of the century, but wow did it make a splash. China had the benefit of cheaper internal transportation than the other Asian players, more resources to throw into the economy, and a labor base bigger than the rest of Asia put together.
以下是截至 2022 年的亚洲制造业格局：
Here’s what the Asian manufacturing constellation looks like as of 2022:
日本、韩国和台湾处理几乎所有增值制成品的高附加值，从白色家电到汽车再到机械，应有尽有。三人在显示器和半导体领域真正出类拔萃，尤其是在大容量芯片的设计和制造方面。韩国人尤其擅长移动电话。
Japan, Korea, and Taiwan handle the high value-add in pretty much all value-added manufactured products, everything from white goods to automotive to machinery. The trio truly excels at displays and semiconductors, most notably in the design and manufacture of high-capacity chips. The Koreans in particular are scary-good at cellular telephony.
日本人和韩国人分别通过一系列庞大的、垂直整合的企业集团经营，分别是经连会和财阀。想想丰田和三菱、三星和 LG。那些企业集团无所不用其极。就挑一个吧：韩国的SK。它是炼油、石化、薄膜、聚酯、太阳能电池板、LCD 和 LED 灯、标签、电池组件、DRAM 和闪存芯片的主要参与者，同时SK在建筑、土木工程和IT 和移动电话服务（不要与电话制造混淆）。Thar是这里的鲸鱼！
Both the Japanese and Koreans operate via a series of sprawling, vertically integrated conglomerates, the keiretsu and chaebol, respectively. Think Toyota and Mitsubishi, Samsung and LG. Those conglomerates do everything. Let’s just pick one: Korea’s SK. It is a major player in oil refining, petrochemicals, films, polyester, solar panels, LCD and LED lights, labels, battery components, DRAM and flash memory chips, and on the side SK does a booming business in construction, civil engineering, and IT and mobile phone services (not to be confused with phone manufacture). Thar be whales here!
相比之下，台湾是一群小鱼。或者，考虑到台湾商业环境的竞争有多激烈，也许称其为食人鱼群更为恰当。台湾为数不多的大公司——例如半导体领导者台积电——比世界级高出一步，部分原因是它们利用了成千上万家高度专注于更广泛半导体行业的一个非常具体领域的小公司的技能。本质上，外国公司或大型台湾公司（如联发科）将每个新芯片设计的数千项微观改进分包给这些小公司，而那些小食人鱼则忙于为整个过程的一小部分做出尽可能坚实的进步. 较大的玩家然后结合整个台湾星座的一流成果研发以制造世界上最好的芯片。它没有比这更高的附加值。
Taiwan, in contrast, is a swarm of minnows. Or, considering how hypercompetitive the Taiwanese business environment can be, maybe calling it a swarm of piranhas would be more apt. What few large firms the Taiwanese have fostered—such as semiconductor leader TSMC—are a step above world-class, in part because they tap the skills of thousands of small firms that hyperfocus on one very specific piece of the broader semiconductor industry. In essence, foreign firms or larger Taiwanese firms such as MediaTek subcontract out thousands of micro-improvements to those small firms for each new chip design, and those minnowy piranhas busy themselves with making as solid advances as possible for one tiny bit of the overall process. The larger players then combine the best-in-class outcomes from the whole constellation of Taiwanese R&D to make their best-in-world chips. It does not get higher value-added than that.
在质量和价值规模的底部是中国，尽管经过多年的努力和数十亿美元的投资，但到目前为止，它不仅无法打入高端市场，甚至无法制造制造大部分高端市场的机器。中间市场的东西。虽然中国的低成本劳动力使中国人能够主导产品组装，但几乎所有高端组件（以及相当数量的中等质量组件）都是从其他地方进口的。中国制造的产品——与组装产品相反——往往处于低端：钢铁和塑料以及任何可以压铸或注塑成型的产品。
At the bottom of the quality and value scale lies China, which despite years of effort and untold billions of dollars invested has to this point not only proven unable to crack the high-end market, it cannot even build the machines that build most of the middle-market stuff. While low-cost labor in China has enabled the Chinese to dominate product assembly, nearly all high-end components (and a fair amount of middle-quality components) are imported from elsewhere. The products China makes—as opposed to assembles—tend to be on the lower end: steel and plastics and anything that can be die-cast or injection-molded.
从许多方面来看，中国正在倒退。自 2006 年以来，中国制造业产值占 GDP 的百分比一直在下降，从企业盈利数据来看，这可能是中国生产效率达到顶峰的一年。
By many measures, China is going backward. The country’s manufacturing output as a percent of GDP has been falling since 2006, which, judging by corporate profitability figures, was probably China’s peak year in terms of production efficiency.
中国本应在 2000 年代后期成为制造业的无竞争力国家，因为它已经耗尽了沿海劳动力资源。相反，沿海地区从内陆进口了至少 3 亿（可能多达 4 亿）工人。*这为中国经济又买了十五年，但代价是在沿海地区以及沿海与内陆之间硬接线，收入和工业发展水平的巨大不平等。
China should have become a noncompetitive country in manufacturing in the late 2000s because it had exhausted its coastal labor pool. Instead the coast imported at least 300 million—likely as many as 400 million—workers from the interior.* That bought the Chinese economy another fifteen years, but at the cost of hardwiring, both within the coast and between the coast and the interior, massive inequality in income and levels of industrial development.
这也使得中国经济以国内为导向、消费驱动、与国际隔绝的目标完全不可能实现。所有这些中国出口的收入都很少流向工人（尤其是来自内地的工人），因此可以花在消费上的钱很少。中国现在的沿海人口正在迅速老龄化，他们的消费需求有限，而且最重要的是人口还没有重新增长。沿海人口与来自内陆、生活在半非法环境中、拥挤不堪、近乎贫民窟的条件，艰苦的工作时间，而且无法重新居住。它都位于一个空荡荡的内部，其经济活动的主要来源是国家对一个工业厂房的投资，该工厂的经济实用性值得怀疑，人口太老而无法重新居住。这一切都发生在一个数十年的独生子女政策鼓励大规模选择性性堕胎的国家，因此根本没有足够多的 40 岁以下妇女首先重新填充该国。
It also makes the Chinese goal of a domestically oriented, consumption-driven, internationally insulated economy flatly impossible to reach. Little of the income from all those Chinese exports went to the workers (especially the workers from the interior), so little can be spent on consumption. China now has a rapidly aging coastal population that has limited consumption needs and—most important—hasn’t repopulated. That coastal population is stacked against a seething migrant class from the interior that lives in semi-illegal circumstances in hypercramped, near-slumlike conditions, working grueling hours, and that cannot repopulate. It is all located next to an emptied-out interior whose primary source of economic activity is state investments into an industrial plant that is of questionable economic usefulness, populated by a demographic that is too old to repopulate. This is all in a country where decades of the One Child Policy have encouraged selective-sex abortions en masse, so there simply are not enough women under forty to repopulate the country in the first place.
连续不断的高速增长浪潮——集中在全世界都能看到它们的沿海地区——使中国的崛起似乎不可避免。现实情况是，中国从其内陆地区和人口结构中借钱，以实现从历史上看非常短期的提振。永远不要让任何人告诉你中国人擅长长期比赛。在中国 3500 年的历史中，他们的帝国在没有大规模领土损失的情况下持续时间最长的是 70 年。那是。正确的。现在。在一个由中国人无法塑造的外部力量创造的地缘政治时代。
The successive waves of hypergrowth—concentrated on the coastal zones where the world can see them—make China’s rise seem inevitable. The reality is China has borrowed from its interior regions and its demography in order to achieve what, historically speaking, is a very short-term boost. Never let anyone tell you the Chinese are good at the long game. In 3,500 years of Chinese history, the longest stint one of their empires has gone without massive territorial losses is seventy years. That’s. Right. Now. In a geopolitical era created by an outside force that the Chinese cannot shape.
回到中国制造业：是的，自 2000 年以来，中国劳动力变得更加熟练，也许翻了一番，或者如果你善意地解释数据，效率翻了三倍。但是由于该国人口加速崩溃，劳动力成本上涨了十五。自世纪之交以来，该国的大部分经济增长都来自超额融资投资，而不是出口或消费。
Back to Chinese manufacturing: Yes, the Chinese workforce has become more skilled, perhaps doubling, or if you interpret the data kindly, tripling in efficiency since 2000. But because of the country’s accelerating demographic collapse, labor costs have gone up by a factor of fifteen. The majority of the country’s economic growth since the turn of the century has come from hyperfinanced investment rather than exports or consumption.
这很难说中国无关紧要或落后；它只是决定了中国能做什么和不能做什么。拥有 10 亿工人可以投掷东西并大量补贴一切，使中国成为低端之王和组装之王。如果你想要一个物联网肉类温度计，它可以告诉你的智能手机你的烤肉有多热，那么来自中国的廉价芯片就可以了。如果你想要一部活泼的智能手机，这样你就可以将篡改过的视频发布到 TikTok，那么你最好选择来自台湾海峡另一边的东西。
That hardly makes China irrelevant or backward; it simply shapes what China can and cannot do. Having a billion workers to throw at things and heavily subsidizing everything makes China the King of the Low End and the Emperor of Assembly. If you want an Internet of Things meat thermometer that can tell your smartphone how hot your roast is, a cheap chip from China will do just fine. If you want a zippy smartphone so you can post your doctored videos to TikTok, it’s best you go with something from the other side of the Taiwan Strait.
泰国和马来西亚在从电子产品到汽车，当然还有半导体的所有领域都处于中间水平。他们很少组装，而是专注于字面上和比喻上的繁重工作。如果说日本人、韩国人和台湾人连接大脑，中国人建造身体，那么泰国人和马来西亚人则将内脏组装在一起，例如汽车、起重机和气候控制系统等设备的布线、中间处理器和半导体。菲律宾提供的工作对中国来说都太低端了。在另一端，新加坡已经发展成为一个空灵的、超凡脱俗的存在，在金融、物流、先进石化、软件和制造业方面表现出色，因此以精确为导向，被用于清洁实验室等内部运作。
Thailand and Malaysia form a middle tier in everything from electronics to automotive to, of course, semiconductors. They do very little assembly and instead focus on the heavy-lift stuff both literally and figuratively. If the Japanese, Koreans, and Taiwanese wire the brains, and the Chinese build the body, the Thais and Malaysians put together the guts, such as wiring, midtier processors, and semiconductors for things like cars and cranes and climate control systems. The Philippines provides the work that is too low-end for even China. At the opposite end, Singapore has evolved into an etheric, otherworldly presence that excels at finance, logistics, advanced petrochemicals, software, and manufacturing so precision-oriented it is used in the internal workings of things like clean labs.
在边缘的是希望找到自己的利基市场的新玩家。拥有2.5亿人口的印度尼西亚正在一点一点地闯入中国的领地。越南希望凭借其密集的人口集群、优良的港口、快速发展的教育体系以及自上而下、不容异议的政治制度，彻底超越中国，成为下一个泰国。印度有着无穷无尽的内部变化，希望从一切事物中分一杯羹。
On the edges are newer players looking to find their own niche. Indonesia—with its 250 million people—is lurching bit by bit into China’s space. Vietnam is hoping to leverage its dense population clusters, excellent ports, rapidly evolving educational system, and top-down, no-dissent-allowed political system to jump over China completely and become the next Thailand. India, with all its endless internal variation, hopes to take a bite out of everything.
如果说有什么不同的话，那就是以上大大低估了亚洲体系的复杂性。想一想美国加利福尼亚州内的各种经济体。旧金山是旅游和金融中心，也是美国经济最不平等的城市地区。硅谷设计和创新了许多在整个亚洲生产的产品——甚至在高科技的日本——但必须进口一切：混凝土、钢铁、电力、食品、水、劳动力。洛杉矶的城市扩张掩饰着大量小型工业生产基地。中央谷地既是一个农业强国，也是该国一些最贫困社区的所在地。那只是一种状态。
If anything, the above vastly understates the Asian system’s complexity. Think of the wild variety of economies just within the American state of California. San Francisco is a tourism and finance hub and the most economically unequal urban area in the country. Silicon Valley designs and innovates many of the products produced throughout Asia—even in high-tech Japan—but has to import everything: concrete, steel, power, food, water, labor. Los Angeles’s urban sprawl disguises a wealth of small-scale industrial production sites. The Central Valley is both an agricultural powerhouse and home to some of the country’s poorest communities. And that’s just one state.
类似的模式和多样性在整个亚洲都适用，尤其是在中国大陆的广大地区。迄今为止，大香港和大上海是中国的金融和科技中心。华北平原——中国一半以上人口的家园——到处都是脑袋。作为参考，美国最富有和最贫穷的州（马里兰州和西弗吉尼亚州）之间的人均收入差异略低于二比一。在中国最富有和最贫穷之间的差异——超城市之间沿海的香港和甘肃的超农村内陆——几乎是十比一。即使这样也低估了协同作用的可能性。自 1995 年以来，中国的主要城市新增了约 5亿人口，其中大部分是来自该国极度贫困的内陆地区的农民工，超低成本的劳动力绝对淹没了每个城市中心。不仅在国内，而且在每个城市中，多种多样的成本结构和劳动力质量比比皆是。难怪中国成为世界工厂。
Similar patterns and diversity hold true throughout Asia, most notably within the broad swath of mainland China. Greater Hong Kong and Greater Shanghai are by far the country’s financial and technological hubs. The North China Plain—home to more than half of China’s population—is all about bulk over brains. For a point of reference, the per capita income variation in the United States between the richest and poorest states—Maryland and West Virginia—is just under two-to-one. In China the variation between richest and poorest—between ultra-urban coastal Hong Kong and ultra-rural interior Gansu—is nearly ten-to-one. Even that understates the possibilities for synergies. Since 1995, China’s major cities have added some 500 million people, mostly migrants from the country’s ultra-poor interior, absolutely swamping every urban center with ultra-low-cost labor. Multiple, varied cost structures and labor quality abound not just within the country, but within each city. No wonder China has become the workshop of the world.
将中国的多种选择与亚洲的多种选择相结合，毫不奇怪，世界的这个角落拥有全球一半的制造供应链步骤——以及大约四分之三的来源世界电子、手机和计算产品。
Mesh the multiplicity of options within China with the multiplicity of options across Asia and it should come as no surprise that this corner of the world is home to fully half of the globe’s manufacturing supply chain steps—as well as the source of some three-quarters of the world’s electronics, cellular, and computing products.
让它发挥作用所必需的是一个战略环境，使船舶能够无风险航行，使该地区无数的劳动力成本结构能够运转，以完美的协同作用生产产品。
All that’s necessary to make it work is a strategic environment that enables ships to sail without risk, enabling the region’s myriad labor cost structures to hum along, cranking out products in perfect synergy.
更智能、更好、更快。. . 以及出口：在以日耳曼为中心的欧洲制造
SMARTER, BETTER, FASTER . . . AND FOR EXPORT: MANUFACTURING IN GERMANOCENTRIC EUROPE
在许多方面，欧洲是对东亚体系的重新诠释，规模较小，多样性也略有下降。欧洲国家一直赞成在本国境内实行一定程度的经济平等主义，这减少了在同一国家内将高工资和低工资结构并置的潜在好处。
In many ways, Europe is a reinterpretation of the East Asian system on a smaller scale and with a bit less diversity. The countries of Europe have always favored a degree of economic egalitarianism within their own borders, reducing the potential benefits of having colocated high- and low-wage structures within the same country.
由于总人口“只有”5 亿，欧洲甚至没有理论上的能力来产生像拥有 14 亿人口的中国这样庞大而多样化的经济体系。但欧洲确实有日本、韩国和台湾（德国、荷兰、奥地利和比利时）。它还拥有自己的泰国和马来西亚（波兰、匈牙利、斯洛伐克和捷克共和国）。
With a total population of “only” a half billion, Europe doesn’t even have the theoretical capacity to generate an economic system as wildly large and divergent as China, with its 1.4 billion souls. But Europe does have a Japan, Korea, and Taiwan (Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, and Belgium). It also has its own Thailands and Malaysias (Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic).
它甚至有以独特的欧洲方式做出贡献的食客。罗马尼亚、保加利亚，尤其是土耳其有点像越南，是的，他们的工资很低，但所有人（对土耳其来说是三倍）在产品质量方面常常出人意料。西班牙处理了大量关于金属框架的繁重工作。
It even has hangers-on that contribute in uniquely European ways. Romania, Bulgaria, and especially Turkey are a bit like Vietnam in that, yes, they are low-wage, but all (and triply so for Turkey) often surprise to the upside in terms of product quality. Spain handles a lot of the heavy work as regards metal framing.
意大利就是意大利。与北欧人不同，北欧人很早就通过将政府令状上下游扩展到更大的政体中来整合他们的人民，因此自然而然地采用了供应链之类的东西，意大利人是从罗马衰落以来一系列相互分离的城邦直到 1800 年代后期正式统一。意大利制造业是本地的，人们很少将其视为一个行业，而更多地被视为一种艺术自豪感。意大利人不做流水线，更不做区域整合。他们不制造。他们工艺。因此，任何来自亚平宁半岛的产品要么在质量和美观方面绝对令人震惊地荒谬（想想兰博基尼），要么在质量和美观方面绝对令人震惊地荒谬（想想菲亚特）。
Italy is, well, Italy. Unlike the Northern Europeans, who integrated their peoples early on by extending government writ up and down river valleys into ever-larger polities and so take to things like supply chains naturally, the Italians were a series of disconnected city-states from the fall of Rome right up to formal unification in the late 1800s. Italian manufacturing is local, and viewed less as an industry and more as a point of artistic pride. Italians don’t do assembly lines, or even regional integration. They don’t manufacture. They craft. As such, any products that come out of the Apennine Peninsula are either absolutely, shockingly ridiculous in their quality and beauty (think Lamborghini) or absolutely, shockingly ridiculous in their lack of quality and beauty (think Fiat).
因为它是欧洲，所以需要过于复杂，该地区是其他三个制造电路的所在地：
Because it is Europe and so needs to be overcomplicated, the region is home to three other manufacturing circuits:
- 法国人确实从荷兰，尤其是比利时那里汲取了一些东西，他们确实为日耳曼网络做出了贡献，但大多数法国人痴迷于将他们的大部分制造业与其他欧洲伙伴分开。在欧盟的主要国家中，法国是迄今为止一体化程度最低的。
- The French do pull a bit from the Netherlands and especially Belgium, and they do contribute to the Germanic network, but mostly the French obsess about keeping most of their manufacturing separate from the rest of their European partners. Of the European Union’s major countries, France is by far the least integrated.
- 瑞典，只有 1000 万人口，有点以自己的方式踢屁股。它与丹麦和芬兰接近同行的工资水平合作，同时依赖爱沙尼亚、立陶宛、波兰，尤其是拉脱维亚的较低工资结构。
- Sweden, with a population of just 10 million, kind of kicks ass in its own way. It partners with near-peer wage levels in Denmark and Finland, while relying upon lower-wage structures in Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, and especially Latvia.
- 英国是。. . 拿不定主意 它在 2015 年投票决定退出欧盟，但直到 2020 年才完成这一过程。. . 并且在没有建立替代交易网络的情况下这样做。英国人现在看到与欧洲大陆建立已久的供应链联系正在崩溃，而无需建立替代系统。结果？短缺。一切。
- The United Kingdom is . . . having trouble making up its mind. It voted back in 2015 to leave the EU but didn’t complete the process until 2020 . . . and did so without setting up an alternative trading network. The Brits are now seeing long-established supply chain linkages to the Continent shattering without necessarily establishing replacement systems. The result? Shortages. In everything.
公司结构方面也存在相当大的差异。法国人很久以前就决定结合使用国家投资、排他性贸易做法和彻底的间谍活动，以鼓励整个法国经济的工业整合成为大规模的国家冠军。荷兰人做了类似的事情，只是排除了排他性贸易惯例和间谍活动。那些超级高效的德国人转而青睐专注于特定产品（例如供暖设备或叉车）的中型公司，并利用整个中欧的大量小公司为其供应链提供动力。英国制造业的高度专业化与土耳其制造业的高度普遍化一样。
There is considerable variety in terms of firm structure as well. The French decided long ago to use a mix of state investment, exclusionary trade practices, and outright espionage to encourage industrial consolidation across the French economy into massive state champions. The Dutch did something similar, minus the exclusionary trade practices and espionage. Those hyperefficient Germans instead favor midsized companies that specialize in specific products—say, heating units or forklifts—and draw upon scads of smaller firms throughout Central Europe to fuel their supply chains. British manufacturing is as hyperspecialized as Turkish manufacturing is hypergeneralized.
欧洲在制造业博弈中的最弱点是其劳动力成本高低之间的脱节不像亚洲那么大，因此欧洲人在受益于更多样化劳动力结构的产品方面没有经济竞争力。先进的德国和工业化程度较低的土耳其之间的差距是 46,000 美元对 9,000 美元，而日本和越南之间的差距是 40,000 美元和 2.7K 美元。欧洲确实没有亚洲意义上的“低端”，因此大量至少部分成本结构依赖于低工资的产品——从基本纺织品到先进计算机的所有产品——都不是在欧洲制造的整个欧洲。总体而言，与东亚相比，欧洲生产的制成品总价值大约占一半。
Europe’s weakest point in the game of manufactures is that its labor cost disconnects between high and low are not as wide as they are in Asia, so the Europeans are not as economically competitive in products that benefit from more varied labor structures. The spread between advanced Germany and less industrialized Turkey is $46K versus $9K, while the Japanese-Vietnamese differential is $40K versus $2.7K. Europe really doesn’t have a “low end” in the Asian sense, so a great number of products that rely upon low wages for at least part of their cost structure—and that’s everything from basic textiles to advanced computers—are not made in Europe at all. Overall, Europe produces roughly half the total value of manufactured products compared with what comes out of East Asia.
相反，欧洲人擅长不太复杂的制造系统。这并不意味着不那么先进的产品——远非如此，来自德国的产品是一流的——而是那些需要更窄成本投入的产品，在所需的最高技能劳动力和最低技能劳动力之间（所以不是这样许多花哨的计算机芯片到一个无聊的塑料外壳，更高端的传输到一个集成的减震保险杠）。汽车和航空航天业占有重要地位，但德国人特别擅长的是制造制造其他东西的机器。中国工业基地自 2005 年以来的大部分扩张之所以成为可能，只是因为德国人建造了实现这一目标的核心机械。
Instead, the Europeans excel at less complicated manufacturing systems. That doesn’t mean less advanced products—far from it, stuff that comes out of Germany is top-of-class—but instead products that require a narrower cost-input spread between the highest skilled labor required and the lowest (so not so much fancy computer chips down to a boring plastic case, and more high-end transmission down to an integrated, shock-absorbing bumper). Automotive and aerospace figure highly, but what the Germans are exceptionally good at is building the machines that manufacture other things. The bulk of the expansion of China’s industrial base since 2005 has been possible only because the Germans built the core machinery that made it happen.
多种选择：在北美制造
A WORLDFUL OF OPTIONS: MANUFACTURING IN NORTH AMERICA
世界第三大制造业集团受北美自由贸易协定约束，该协定是加拿大、墨西哥和美国的经济联盟。NAFTA 体系与其竞争对手完全不同。绝对有一个主导者——当然是美国——但这个参与者也是技术最先进的。加拿大存在相似的工资和技术水平，因此存在的整合主要集中在密歇根州底特律与安大略省温莎市的交汇处——北美汽车制造业北叶的核心。连接这两个城市的单座大桥承载的货运量按价值计算超过了美国与除其前三大贸易伙伴之外的所有贸易伙伴的贸易总额。
The world’s third major manufacturing bloc is under the North American Free Trade Agreement, an economic alliance of Canada, Mexico, and the United States. The NAFTA system is utterly unlike its competitors. There is far and away a dominant player—the United States, of course—but that player is also the most technologically advanced. Canada exists at a similar wage and tech level, so what integration exists is largely concentrated where Detroit, Michigan, meets Windsor, Ontario—the core of the northern lobe of North American automotive manufacturing. The single bridge connecting the two cities carries more cargo traffic by value than America’s total trade with all but its top three trading partners.
北美制造业有两个魔力。第一个是在美国本土。美国是个大地方。就平坦的可用土地而言，它的面积很容易是欧洲或中国的两倍，这两个国家都有大片几乎无用的山区、沙漠或苔原。两国都建立了他们所能管理的尽可能多的人口，而美国人可以轻松地将人口翻一番，并且仍然拥有大量闲置土地（这正是 21 世纪末可能发生的情况）。美国可能没有整个亚洲和欧洲较小程度存在的工资差异，但它在地理上弥补了这一点变化。美国不同地区的食品、电力、石油产品和土地成本大相径庭。
There are two bits of magic in the manufacturing of North America. The first is within the United States itself. America is a big place. In terms of flattish, usable land, it is easily twice the size of either Europe or China, both of which have vast swaths of nigh-useless territories that are mountainous or desert or tundra. Both have built up about as large a population as they can manage, while the Americans could easily double their population and still have loads of spare land (which is precisely what’s likely to happen by the end of the twenty-first century). America may not have the wage variation that exists throughout Asia and to a lesser degree in Europe, but it more than makes up for it with geographic variation. Different parts of the United States have wildly different costs for food, electricity, petroleum products, and land.
每个地区都有自己独特的特点：
Each region has its own unique characteristics:
- 卡斯卡迪亚以其左翼政治、严厉的监管、工会化的环境而闻名，但最重要的是，城市土地成本高昂。西雅图坐落在地峡上，而波特兰则被挤压在高地之间。两者都拥有与其房地产价格一样史诗般的交通。从成本的角度来看，唯一的优势是该地区廉价的电力。*太平洋西北地区在制造业领域的唯一作用是向高端市场转移并提供尽可能高的附加值。这是波音和微软的土地。
- Cascadia is known for its left-wing politics, hefty regulation, unionized environment, but most important, sky-high urban land costs. Seattle sits on an isthmus, while Portland is squashed between highlands. Both boast traffic as epic as their property prices. The only saving grace from a cost point of view is the region’s cheap electricity.* The only play the Pacific Northwest has in the world of manufacturing is to move upmarket and provide the highest value-add possible. This is the land of Boeing and Microsoft.
- 美国东北部紧紧紧紧！土地成本高。人工成本高。基础设施超载。监管壁垒高。严重工会化。人口稠密的城市。绿地几乎为零。大多数制造业早已撤出该地区，留下了一个奇怪的分叉点。首先是几乎可以追溯到该国工业化时期的传统公司，例如 GE、Raytheon 和 Thermo Fisher Scientific。没有一个在当地生产那么多，但公司总部和密集的设计工作都以马萨诸塞州为家。其次，由于选址、劳动力和法规遵从性成本的不断上升，这里仍在建造的东西已经受到影响。它是工业和脑力劳动的结合：生物医学、系统控制、科学仪器、航空和导航设备、电气系统以及设计、总装、以及各种航空航天、海事和海军硬件的翻新。最重要的是，东北是培训针对的是驱动美国各地制造业的脑力劳动。毕竟，东北部是耶鲁大学、哈佛大学和最神圣的书呆子殿堂麻省理工学院的所在地。
- The American Northeast is tight tight tight! High land costs. High labor costs. Overloaded infrastructure. High regulatory barriers. Heavily unionized. Densely populated cities. Nearly zero green space to be had. Most manufacturing has long since decamped the region, leaving behind a weird bifurcation. First are the legacy corporations that date back nearly to the country’s industrialization, such as GE, Raytheon, and Thermo Fisher Scientific. None produce all that much locally, but corporate headquarters and intensive design work both call Massachusetts home. Second, what stuff is still built here has been shaped by ever-rising costs for siting, labor, and regulatory compliance. It is a merger of industry and brain work: biomedical, systems controls, scientific instruments, aeronautical and navigational devices, electrical systems, and the design, final assembly, and refurbishment of a variety of aerospace, maritime, and naval hardware. Above all, the Northeast is where the training takes place for the brain work that drives all American manufacturing everywhere. After all, the Northeast is home to Yale, Harvard, and that most hallowed hall of nerds, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
- Front Range——这些天我挂帽子的地方——和Arizona Sun Corridor是天壤之别。土地非常便宜。规定是针对篝火的。但是人并不多，而且城市之间肯定也不靠得很近。这两个区域的城市走廊的总人口不超过 1000 万，而且从科罗拉多斯普林斯驱车前往（非常广阔）的最南端丹佛地铁，到阿尔伯克基是一个很酷的四个小时。*在非常有限的规模经济和高昂的区域内运输成本之间，标准制造供应链几乎是不可能的。解决方案？技术服务和一体式制造中心，除非对产品的运输有意义，否则不会与该国其他地区高度整合。这是美国进入日本和台湾风格的高端半导体制造的角落。
- The Front Range—where I hang my hat these days—and the Arizona Sun Corridor are a world apart. Land is dirt cheap. Regulations are for the bonfire. But there just aren’t all that many people, and the cities are certainly not close together. The combined population of the two zones’ urban corridors isn’t much more than 10 million, and the drive from Colorado Springs, the southern extreme of the (very-extended) Denver metro, to Albuquerque is a cool four hours.* Between very limited economies of scale and high in-region transport costs, standard manufacturing supply chains are almost out of the question. The solution? Tech servicing and all-in-one manufacturing hubs that don’t heavily integrate with the rest of the country unless it makes sense for the product to be flown. This is the corner of America getting into high-end semiconductor fabrication of the Japanese and Taiwanese style.
- 墨西哥湾沿岸是能源巷。石油和天然气都在那里生产和加工。页岩革命使该地区涌入了大量低成本、高质量的碳氢化合物，以至于该地区正忙于扩建其工业厂房，不仅生产丙烯或甲醇等中间产品，还生产越来越低端的产品，如安全玻璃、尿布、轮胎、尼龙、塑料和化肥。最大的问题？选址可能有点麻烦。大型炼油厂需要海上通道和大量空间。尽管如此，这个地区还是有两个幸运的地方。首先，得克萨斯州海岸拥有广泛的屏障岛链，为其提供了比所有其他港口都更具保护性的港口潜力亚洲（路易斯安那州南部的密西西比河下游甚至一点也不破旧）。其次，大多数美国石化设施的建造距离都很远。（在高温下处理大量石油和天然气可能是一项危险的工作。）至少有一些空地可以转化（并且正在转化）为更多的工业产能。
- The Gulf Coast is Energy Alley. Petroleum and natural gas are both produced and processed there. The shale revolution has so deluged the region in vast volumes of low-cost, high-quality hydrocarbons that the region is busy expanding its industrial plant to make not just intermediate products like propylene or methanol, but increasingly downmarket products like safety glass, diapers, tires, nylon, plastics, and fertilizer. The biggest problem? Siting can be a bit of a bitch. Big refineries need maritime access and lots of space. Still, this region lucks out in two ways. First, the Texas coast sports an extensive chain of barrier islands that provide it with more shielded port potential than all of Asia (and the lower Mississippi in southern Louisiana isn’t even remotely shabby, either). Second, most American petrochemical facilities were built with lots of standoff distance. (Working with large volumes of oil and natural gas at high temperatures can be dangerous work.) At least some of that empty space can be converted (and is being converted) into yet more industrial capacity.
- 美国皮埃蒙特地区是一个持续出人意料的地区。低于平均水平的教育系统。半崎岖地形既增加了运输和土地成本，又限制了整合和规模经济的机会。河流运输的选择有限。感觉南方不应该很成功。但当地人的魅力足以弥补他们的缺点。南方人不是等待投资者来找他们，而是冒险去寻找世界各地的潜在投资者，通常带着他们代表团的波本威士忌的总重量来消除任何文化障碍。*一旦南方人喝醉了，呃，找到了一个投资者，他们就会开始回国工作，创造完美的定制商业环境。基础设施得到扩展，劳动力不仅针对投资者的业务而且针对特定工作精心定制，税法发生变化，南方人做他们最擅长的事情：让外人觉得他们是家庭的一部分。尴尬的小美国人投资驱动南方，但外国投资？到处。美国南部已成为德国大众和梅赛德斯-奔驰的游乐场；日本本田、马自达、日产、丰田；韩国的现代和起亚；和瑞典的沃尔沃。即使是吹毛求疵的空中客车公司也在南卡罗来纳州的查尔斯顿和阿拉巴马州的莫比尔设有工厂。
- A region that consistently surprises to the upside is the American Piedmont. Sub-average educational system. Semi-rugged terrain that both increases transport and land costs while limiting opportunities for integration and economies of scale. Limited options for river transport. It doesn’t feel like the South should be very successful. But the locals more than make up for their shortcomings with oppressively felonious levels of charm. Rather than wait for investors to come to them, southerners venture out to potential investors the world over, typically bringing with them their delegation’s combined body weight in bourbon to smooth over any cultural barriers.* Once the southerners inebriate, er, land an investor, they then set to work back home to create the perfect customized business environment. Infrastructure is expanded, the workforce is exquisitely tailored not just for the investor’s business but for specific jobs, tax laws are changed, and the southerners do what they do best: make outsiders feel like they’re part of the family. Embarrassingly little American investment drives the South, but foreign investment? Everywhere. The American South has become a playground for Germany’s VW and Mercedes-Benz; Japan’s Honda, Mazda, Nissan, and Toyota; Korea’s Hyundai and Kia; and Sweden’s Volvo. Even persnickety Airbus has facilities in Charleston, South Carolina, and Mobile, Alabama.
- 佛罗里达。你去佛罗里达是为了海滩、迪斯尼乐园和退休——而不是为了制造东西。我们正在走路。. .
- Florida. You go to Florida for beaches, Disney World, and retirement—not to manufacture stuff. And we’re walking . . .
- 五大湖地区曾被称为美国的钢铁带。1800 年代中期的一些运河工程将东北部与五大湖和大密西西比河连接起来，使该地区成为地球上最大的综合制造区。有一段时间。在大萧条时期，美国人采用了被称为“琼斯法案”的法案，该法案强制在任何两个美国港口之间运输的任何货物只能使用美国建造、拥有、船长和船员的船只。保守地说，这使美国的水路运输成本增加了五倍。是什么让这个地区变得特别和成功？加上全球化时代的国际竞争，该地区自此成为。. . 重新设想为锈带，尽管可以说拥有全国最好的教育体系。当然，制造业仍然存在。伊利诺伊州是约翰迪尔的故乡，即使在今天，该大陆的大部分大型农场设备也是在中西部制造的。底特律并不懒散，但也不是该地区的常态。大多数参与者都不是大批量、高度集成的系统，而是规模较小，大量从事高技术定制工作，并且经常向 .供应专业零件。. .
- The Great Lakes region was once known as America’s Steel Belt. A bit of canal work in the mid-1800s connected the Northeast to the Great Lakes and Greater Mississippi, making this region the greatest integrated manufacturing zone on the planet. For a time. During the Great Depression the Americans adopted something known as the Jones Act, which forced any cargo shipped between any two American ports to use only vessels that were American built, owned, captained, and crewed. That, put conservatively, increased the cost of water transport in the United States by a factor of five. What made this region special and successful withered. Add in international competition during the globalization age and the region has since been . . . reimagined as the Rust Belt, despite arguably having the nation’s best educational system. Manufacturing still exists of course. Illinois is home to none other than John Deere, with the bulk of the continent’s large farm equipment even today manufactured in the Midwest. Detroit is no slouch, but neither is it the region’s norm. Instead of mass-volume, heavily integrated systems, most players are on the small side, heavy into highly technical custom work and often supplying specialty parts to . . .
- 德州！得克萨斯三角区包括休斯顿、达拉斯-沃思堡、奥斯汀和圣安东尼奥等城市。从制造业的角度来看，三角区拥有一切：便宜的食物、便宜的电力、便宜的土地、没有所得税、最低的公司税、令人捧腹的轻松监管。这不会改变。见鬼，德州立法机构每隔一段时间才开一次会一年，只有 35 天，根据宪法，立法者甚至被禁止在该时间窗口的前半段考虑立法。各类美国制造商纷纷涌入该地区。最大的一个子行业是汽车，但这过于简单化了令人眼花缭乱的多样性和活力。奥斯汀将硅谷的想法付诸实践。达拉斯-沃思堡利用其银行中心将奥斯汀的脑力劳动转化为大规模生产。圣安东尼奥市将甚至低于得克萨斯州平均水平的成本与奥斯汀的技术相结合，以摧毁任何可以放在装配线上的东西。但德州比赛的真正明星是休斯顿。它在科技领域与奥斯汀、在自动化领域与达拉斯-沃思堡、在大规模制造领域与圣安东尼奥相提并论，它是一个金融之都，它是美国的能源中心，位于墨西哥湾沿岸地区，按价值计算，它是美国最大的港口，非常擅长搬运大块金属。德国人擅长的机器工作？休斯顿在全球稳居第二。难怪休斯敦是美国第二大财富 500 强总部集中地。
- TEXAS! The Texas Triangle comprises the cities of Houston, Dallas–Fort Worth, Austin, and San Antonio. From a manufacturing point of view, the Triangle has it all: cheap food, cheap power, cheap land, no income tax, minimal corporate tax, hilariously light regulations. And that won’t change. Hell, the Texas legislature only meets once every other year, for only thirty-five days, and legislators are constitutionally barred from even considering legislation for the first half of that time window. American manufacturers of all types have flocked to the region. The single biggest subsector is automotive, but that oversimplifies a dizzying variety and dynamism. Austin operationalizes Silicon Valley’s ideas. Dallas–Fort Worth leverages its banking center to turn Austin’s brain work into mass manufacturing. San Antonio mixes lower costs than even the Texas average with the tech of Austin to blow out anything that can be put on an assembly line. But the real star of the Texas game is Houston. It plays with Austin in tech and Dallas–Fort Worth in automation and San Antonio with mass manufacture and it is a financial capital and it is America’s energy hub and it is in the Gulf Coast region and it is America’s biggest port by value and it is really good at moving around big chunks of metal. That machine work the Germans are so good at? Houston comes in a solid second place globally. No wonder Houston is the country’s second-largest concentration for Fortune 500 headquarters.
美国的大部分地区都可以单独飞行，但他们不需要这样做。再加上用于运输中间产品的广泛的公路和铁路系统，美国制造系统在许多方面的多样性甚至超过了亚洲，即使没有它的南北邻国。
Most of America’s regions would do very well flying solo, but they do not need to. Add in the country’s broad-scale road and rail system for transporting intermediate products, and in many ways the American manufacturing system has more variety than even Asia, even without its northern and southern neighbors.
这给我们带来了北美自由贸易协定制造业的第二个魔力。美国确实有一个与其体系相辅相成的邻国：墨西哥。美国和墨西哥平均工资的差距大约为六比一，小于亚洲的差距，但大于欧洲的差距。然而，这并不能说明全部情况。与我们介绍过的许多其他国家相比，墨西哥是一个不同的野兽。直到 1990 年代，反美主义才停止支配墨西哥的工业政策，而墨西哥直到 2000 年才真正开始玩工业化游戏——顺便说一下，这只是中国加入世界贸易组织之前的心跳。
This brings us to the second bit of magic in NAFTA manufacturing. America does have a neighbor that complements its system: Mexico. The wage differential between the American and the Mexican average is approximately six-to-one, less than Asia’s split, but bigger than Europe’s. That doesn’t tell the entire story, however. Mexico is a different beast compared to many of the other countries we’ve covered. Anti-Americanism didn’t stop dictating Mexican industrial policy until the 1990s, and Mexico didn’t really start playing the industrialization game until 2000—which, incidentally, is a mere heartbeat before China was admitted to the World Trade Organization.
作为一个迟到的起步者肯定会产生一些问题，但没有什么比它的地形更能阻碍墨西哥的发展了。墨西哥的低纬度使其牢牢地处于热带地区。热带高温、热带湿气和热带虫子的结合使热带成为最不利于工业化的气候；建筑材料受到损害，混凝土经常因潮湿而凝固不正确，沥青在高温下滑动，人们必须与热带疾病作斗争。墨西哥人通过搬到 Sierra Madre 山脉之间广阔的高原上来解决这些问题，但这产生了新的问题：生活在高海拔地区意味着没有沿海通道，也没有通航河流，需要每一步都必须与地形作斗争的人工基础设施。在坡度低至 0.25% 的铁轨上，火车只能承载其铭牌容量的一半，而在大多数山区，坡度都远远超过 0.25%。一切都很快变得非常昂贵。
Being a late starter definitely generated some problems, but nothing has held Mexico back more than its topography. Mexico’s low latitude puts it firmly in the tropics. The combination of tropical heat and tropical moisture and tropical bugs makes the tropics the most problematic climate possible for industrialization; building materials are compromised, concrete often sets incorrectly due to the humidity, asphalt slides in the heat, and the population must do battle with tropical diseases. Mexicans address these issues by moving up onto the broad plateau between the Sierra Madre mountain chains, but that has generated new problems: Living at altitude means no coastal access and no navigable rivers, necessitating artificial infrastructure that must battle with the terrain at every step. Trains can only carry half their nameplate capacity when on rails that are on as little as a 0.25 percent slope, and there’s a lot more than a 0.25 percent slope on most mountains. Everything gets very expensive very quickly.
上山的另一个“问题”是，爬得越高，湿度和水蒸气压越低。对于生活在海平面的人来说，这意味着水不仅蒸发得很快，而且实际上沸腾的温度更低，特别是墨西哥城比迈阿密低 15 度左右。
Another “problem” of moving upmountain is that the higher one climbs, the lower the humidity and the vapor pressure of water. For those of you who live at sea level, that means water not only evaporates quickly, it actually boils at a lower temperature, specifically about 15 degrees lower in Mexico City than in Miami.
这些特征把我们带到了两个地方。首先，墨西哥确实存在使东亚运作良好的那种极端劳动力成本差异——该国的分裂性质确保了这一点——但这种差异并不容易获得，使得这一点或多或少没有实际意义，直到墨西哥的基础设施可以赶上。
These characteristics take us two places. First, Mexico does have an extreme labor-cost variation of the sort that makes East Asia work so well—the country’s fractured nature ensures it—but that variation is not easily accessible, making the point more or less moot until such time as Mexico’s infrastructure can catch up.
其次，当人们从墨西哥城向北移动时，更高的纬度加上不同的风流和海流以及不断变化的山脉肤色将土地变成了沙漠。通常这会很糟糕。降雨量如此之低，以至于墨西哥北部几乎没有非灌溉农业。这意味着城市是独立的。没有腹地可以吸引明天的人口。
Second, as one moves north from Mexico City, the combination of higher latitudes plus different wind and sea currents and a shifting mountain complexion turns the land to desert. Normally this would be bad. Rainfall is so low that very little non-irrigated agriculture occurs in northern Mexico at all. That means cities are on their own. There are no hinterlands to draw tomorrow’s population from.
但这反过来又创造了一种有趣的政治和经济动态。当城市本质上是绿洲时，正常的演变是一个人或一小群人控制几乎所有的东西。如果需要建设基础设施或工业厂房，就必须有人出钱，谁出钱就喜欢控制它。如果城市没有被森林或农场带包围，叛军就真的无处可藏。这使得墨西哥体系——尤其是墨西哥北部城市——相当寡头。
But that in turn creates an interesting political and economic dynamic. When cities are, in essence, oases, the normal evolution is for a single person or small group of people to assert control over just about everything. If infrastructure or industrial plant needs to be built, someone has to pay for it, and whoever does the paying likes to keep control over it. If the city isn’t surrounded by a belt of forest or farms, there really isn’t anywhere for rebels to hide. That makes the Mexican system—particularly the northern Mexican cities—fairly oligarchic.
通常，寡头制度既不富裕也不充满活力，因为老板们把钱留给了自己。然而，就墨西哥北部而言，这些 jefes 位于美国边境，是通往世界上最大的工业和消费市场的门户。这改变了数学。墨西哥北部的商人仍然相互融合，至少在他们自己的共享都市区内是这样，但对他们来说，融入美国供应系统，尤其是富裕的德克萨斯三角供应系统更为重要。
Normally, oligarchic systems are neither wealthy nor dynamic, because the bosses keep the cash to themselves. In the case of northern Mexico, however, these jefes are hard up on the U.S. border and serve as gateways to the world’s largest industrial and consumer market. That changes the math. Northern Mexican businesspeople still integrate with one another, at least within their own shared metro region, but it is far more important for them to plug into an American supply system, particularly the wealthy Texas Triangle supply system.
也许最重要的是，美国拥有发达国家最健康的人口结构，而墨西哥则拥有先进发展中国家的最佳人口结构。边境两边都有很多消费。
Perhaps best of all, while the United States features the developed world’s healthiest demographic structure, Mexico features the best of the advanced developing world’s. There’s plenty of consumption on both sides of the border.
最终结果：得克萨斯-墨西哥轴心拥有日本的技术成熟度、中国的工资差异以及德国与其邻国的一体化，所有这些都在世界最大消费市场的足迹之内。
End result: the Texas–Mexico axis boasts the technological sophistication of Japan, the wage variation of China, and the integration of Germany with its neighbors, all within the footprint of the world’s largest consumption market.
这就是我们现在的处境。但现在不是未来。
That is where we are now. But now is not the future.
未来地图
The Map of the Future
在三大制造业环境中，亚洲的可持续性是迄今为止最不可持续的。
Of the three major manufacturing environments, Asia’s is by far the least sustainable.
这是 。. . 有点不知从何开始。
It is . . . somewhat difficult to know where to begin.
亚洲公司的终结
THE END OF ASIA INC.
有邻里角度：
There’s the neighborhood angle:
四个东北亚经济体相处不来。只有美国在韩国和日本的两个最大的海外军事部署使当地人免于互相掐架。只有美国海军力量的威胁才能阻止中国人尝试一些可爱的东西。无论是因为当地的历史愤怒和焦虑，还是因为美国的离开，在这个正在展开的世界中，东亚人不可能进行必要的生产性合作，以实现广谱、多式联运、一体化、和平的制造供应链。东北亚人在政治上、战略上和文化上都无法达到形成他们自己版本的北美自由贸易协定所需的信任程度，更不用说定义欧盟的那种联合决策了。
The four Northeast Asian economies do not get along. Only America’s two largest overseas military deployments—in South Korea and Japan—keep the locals from being at each other’s throats. Only the threat of American naval power prevents the Chinese from trying something cute. Whether because of local historical anger and angst or American departure, in the world unfolding there is no way on Earth the East Asians are capable of the sort of productive cooperation necessary to enable broad-spectrum, multimodal, integrated, and peaceful manufacturing supply chains. The Northeast Asians are politically, strategically, and culturally incapable of the degree of trust required to form their own version of NAFTA, much less the kind of joint decision making that defines the European Union.
这是人口统计学的角度：
There’s the demographic angle:
2019 年，中国的出生率出现了有记录以来的最大降幅。遗憾的是，这是预料之中的。独生子女政策长期压低了中国的出生率，以至于中国现在已经没有二十多岁的孩子了，而二十多岁的人就是要孩子的人。产生更少的年轻人，新一代不能有很多孩子。将他们全部塞进城市公寓，甚至那些可以生孩子的人也不想生孩子。
In calendar year 2019, China suffered the greatest decline in its birth rate on record. Sad to say, it was expected. The One Child Policy had depressed China’s birth rate for long enough that China is now running out of twenty-somethings, and twenty-somethings are the people who have the kids. Generate fewer young adults and the new generation cannot have many kids. Cram them all into urban condos and even those who can have kids don’t want to.
更糟糕的是很快就会到来。2020年的数据表明下降幅度更大。Instinct 将这种下降归因于冠状病毒，但需要九个月的时间才能生下一个婴儿。因此，2020 年的下降大部分是由于 2019 年的环境和选择造成的。从形式上讲，中国的出生率不仅仅是自 1978 年以来最低的，上海和北京这两个中国最大城市的出生率现在是世界上最低的. 在撰写本文时，我们仍在等待 2021 年的最终数据，但来自中国各地的轶事对于占主导地位的汉族人口来说已经超出了可怕的范围。
Worse was soon to come. Data from 2020 data indicated an even greater drop. Instinct credits the drop to coronavirus, but it takes nine months to generate a baby. Most of the 2020 drop, therefore, was due to circumstances and choices made in 2019. Formally, China’s birth rate isn’t simply the lowest since 1978, birth rates in Shanghai and Beijing—China’s largest cities—are now the lowest in the world. At the time of this writing we are still waiting for finalized 2021 data, but anecdotals from throughout China are beyond horrid for the dominant Han population.
非汉人更甚。说说你对毛的看法，但他的共产主义版本对中国的许多少数民族情有独钟*并允许他们免于独生子。但毛主义共产主义早已死去，取而代之的是钢铁般的新法西斯极端民族主义。随着中国在去全球化的世界中面临解体的恐惧，中国共产党开始系统地迫害其少数民族，以至于将中共官员派驻在人们的家中，以防止他们生育等。新疆维吾尔人出生率下降一半就在 2018 年和 2020 年之间。中国的一些少数民族现在实际上处于零儿童政策之下，而不是独生子女的例外。加起来，中国现在是世界上老龄化速度最快的社会。
They are even worse for the non-Han. Say what you will about Mao, but his version of communism had a bit of a soft spot for China’s many minorities* and allowed them exemptions to One Child. But Maoist communism is long dead, replaced by a steely neofascist ultranationalism. As China faces the terror of disintegration in a deglobalized world, the Chinese Communist Party has begun systematic persecution of its minorities to the point of stationing CCP officials inside people’s homes to prevent them from, among other things, procreating. The Uighirs of Xinjiang saw their birth rate drop by half just between 2018 and 2020. Instead of exceptions to One Child, some of China’s minorities are now de facto under a Zero Child Policy. Add it up and China is now the world’s fastest-aging society.
东亚其他地方的人口状况没有那么明显，但这并不是说它们好得多。日本已经是世界上人口老龄化最严重的国家（并且是老龄化最快的国家，直到中国在 2020 年接过这一桂冠）。韩国的生育率比日本晚了 20 年，但发展速度更快。台湾和泰国落后韩国大约十年。甚至拥有大约 4 亿人口的人口稠密的印度尼西亚和越南也受到了城市化问题的困扰。两者都没有接近“不归路”点，但它们在 2021 年的人口结构看起来与 1980 年代的中国非常相似。
The demographic situations elsewhere in East Asia aren’t quite so graphic, but that’s not to say they are much better. Japan is already the world’s oldest demography (and was the fastest-aging one until China took up that mantle in 2020). Korea’s baby bust started twenty years after Japan’s, but has progressed faster. Taiwan and Thailand are roughly a decade behind Korea. Even populous Indonesia and Vietnam, with roughly 400 million people between them, have been bitten by the urbanization bug. Neither is close to that “no return” point, but their demographic structure in 2021 looks remarkably similar to China’s in the 1980s.
快速老龄化给亚洲人带来了三重束缚：首先，劳动力老龄化通常可能效率更高，但它们也更昂贵。中国的低技能劳动力供应在 2000 年代初期达到顶峰。在撰写本文时，中国的熟练劳动力供应正处于顶峰。最终结果是显而易见的，也是不可避免的：更高的劳动力成本。中国不再是低成本生产者，它在价值链上的提升速度不够快，不足以成为高质量生产者。
Rapid aging strikes the Asians with a triple bind: First, aging workforces may typically be more productive, but they are also more expensive. China’s low-skilled labor supply peaked in the early 2000s. China’s skilled labor supply is peaking at the time of this writing. The end result is as clear as it is unavoidable: higher labor costs. China is no longer the low-cost producer, and it hasn’t moved up the value chain fast enough to be the high-quality producer.
其次，如此迅速的老龄化使整个亚洲人——尤其是中国人——无法摆脱他们的出口模式。根本没有足够的当地消费甚至希望吞噬亚洲人生产的一切。如果美国人不再授权亚洲人向世界出口，整个亚洲模式将在一夜之间失败。第三，也是最后一点，快速老龄化的劳动力完全有能力通过大规模退休在自身压力下崩溃。
Second, such rapid aging precludes the Asians in general—and the Chinese in particular—from ever breaking away from their export model. There simply isn’t enough local consumption to even hope to gobble up everything the Asians produce. And if the Americans no longer empower the Asians to export the world over, the entire Asian model fails overnight. Third and finally, rapidly aging workforces are perfectly capable of collapsing under their own weight via mass retirement.
有输入访问的问题：
There’s the question of input access:
中国每天需要 1400 万桶石油，其中 70% 以上靠进口；台湾、韩国和日本分别需要进口 1、2 和 400 万桶的 95% 以上。他们超过三分之二的流入来自波斯湾，这个地区在秩序下并不完全充满稳定，更不用说在美国撤军后变得更加稳定了。中国是每种工业商品的最大进口国，日本和韩国稳居前五。
China imports more than 70 percent of its 14 million barrels of oil it needs every day; Taiwan, Korea, and Japan import more than 95 percent of their 1, 2, and 4 million barrel needs, respectively. More than two-thirds of all their inflows originate in the Persian Gulf, a region not exactly brimming with stability under the Order, much less expecting to become more stable in the aftermath of the American withdrawal. China is the biggest importer of every industrial commodity, with the Japanese and Koreans reliably showing up in the top five.
除了能源，几乎所有相关的工业商品都来自南半球，其中澳大利亚、巴西和撒哈拉以南非洲是最大的参与者。不是来自他们的东西来自俄罗斯，虽然我不会把中俄冲突放在我的“可能出错的事情”清单的首位，但它也远不及底部。毕竟，俄罗斯人有着利用资源流动获取地缘政治让步的悠久传统。
Energy aside, nearly all the industrial commodities in question come from the Southern Hemisphere, with Australia, Brazil, and sub-Saharan Africa being the biggest players. What doesn’t come from them comes from Russia, and while I wouldn’t put Chinese-Russian conflict at the top of my things-that-can-go-wrong list, it is nowhere near the bottom, either. The Russians, after all, have a time-honored tradition of using resource flows to extract geopolitical concessions.
也许对中国人来说最大的问题将是。. . 日本。中国海军是沿海和近海的海军，只有大约 10% 的水面舰艇能够在离岸 1000 英里以上的海域航行。很少有人能航行超过 2,000 英里。中国没有真正的盟友（也许朝鲜除外），因此投射力量。. . 任何地方都是一个热闹不可能。相比之下，日本拥有一支完全有能力在一两个大陆之外航行和作战的海军。如果到了紧要关头，日本人可以简单地派遣一支小型特遣队越过新加坡进入印度洋，并远程切断中国的资源流入——并与他们一起切断中国。
Perhaps the biggest problem for the Chinese will be . . . the Japanese. China’s navy is coastal and near coastal, with only about 10 percent of its surface combatants capable of sailing more than 1,000 miles from shore. Very few can sail more than 2,000 miles. China has no real allies (except maybe North Korea), so projecting power . . . anywhere is a hilarious impossibility. Japan, in contrast, has a navy fully capable of sailing—and fighting—a continent or two away. Should push come to shove, the Japanese can simply dispatch a small task force past Singapore into the Indian Ocean and shut down Chinese resource inflows—and with them, shut down China—remotely.
有一个规模经济的角度：
There’s an economies of scale angle:
亚洲制造模式的秘诀在于该地区高度多样化的劳动力市场，以及美国提供和补贴的安全环境和全球贸易网络。人口崩溃正在颠覆前者，而美国的撤军正在结束后者。任何推高成本或增加安全担忧的事情都会降低东亚人在制造业领域共同努力的能力。失去让亚洲与众不同的东西，亚洲就没有理由继续成为最差异化的制造市场（电子和计算）的全球中心。
The secret sauce of the Asian manufacturing model is the region’s highly variant labor markets, combined with the American-provided and -subsidized security environment and global trade network. Demographic collapse is upending the former, while the American withdrawal is ending the latter. Anything that drives up costs or increases security concerns reduces the capacity of the East Asians to mount a joint effort in the world of manufacturing. Lose what makes Asia special and there is no reason at all for Asia to continue being the global hub in that most differentiated of manufacturing markets: electronics and computing.
有一个供应链角度：
There’s a supply chain angle:
任何提高制造或运输的边际成本，或增加制造或运输的不稳定性和风险的任何事情，都会从理论上消除即时库存。这迫使制造业更接近终端消费点。由于 Asia Inc. 是世界上最大的制造商和出口商，因此世界上的这一地区将受到未来制造与消费共置的影响最大。由于准时制的概念意味着没有人会储存太多库存，所以当它下降时，它会一下子全部下降。
Anything that raises the marginal cost of manufacturing or transport, or increases instability and risk in manufacturing or transport, eliminates just-in-time inventorying from even theoretically working. That forces manufacturing closer to end consumption points. Since Asia Inc. is the world’s largest manufacturer and exporter, it is this part of the world that will suffer the most from the future colocation of manufacturing with consumption. And since the very concept of just-in-time means no one stores much inventory, when it goes down, it’ll all go down, all at once.
如果亚洲的人口结构和地缘政治使（或更有可能破坏）区域生产过程复杂化，那么电子、手机和计算等子行业在这里垄断就没有经济理由。打破亚洲对该市场的控制，哪怕是一点点，让东亚成为无可争议的世界工厂的规模经济就会消失。
If Asian demographics and geopolitics complicate (or, more likely, breach) regional production processes, then there will be no economic reason for the subsectors of electronics, cellular phones, and computing to be monopolized here. Break Asia’s chokehold on that market, even a little, and the economies of scale that have kept East Asia the undisputed workshop of the world will erode away.
中国具体面临后续挑战：
China specifically faces a follow-on challenge:
中国作为世界工厂，完全依赖进口技术和零部件。在半导体、电话和航空航天等高价值领域，中国发布了国家计划成为所有领域的全球领导者，但事实证明，它普遍无法自行制造低纳米芯片或喷气发动机等高附加值部件。*我们大多数人只是假设中国人主导的产品——家用电子产品、办公设备和计算机——实际上 90% 以上的附加值都在中国以外。对于船舶，这个数字是 87%。对于电信设备和大多数电子产品的核心，这一比例为 83%。即使对于纸张、塑料和橡胶等极其低俗的工作，超过一半的附加值也发生在其他地方。*
China as the workshop of the world is utterly dependent upon imported technology and components. In high-value sectors such as semiconductors, telephony, and aerospace, China has published national plans to become the global leader in all, but it has proven broadly incapable of manufacturing high-value-add components like low-nanometer chips or jet engines on its own.* Items most of us just assume the Chinese dominate in—household electronics, office equipment, and computers—actually have more than 90 percent of their value added outside of China. For ships the figure is 87 percent. For telecom gear and the guts of most electronic gadgetry it is 83 percent. Even for exceedingly lowbrow work such as paper, plastics, and rubber, upwards of half of the value-add happens elsewhere.*
中国的失败在某种程度上简化了该国的工业模式：中国使用其超额融资模式来降低其可以生产的组件的成本；它进口无法生产的零件，将它们插入，然后将最终产品发送出去。但这种模式只有在外部供应商积极参与的情况下才能奏效。从安全危机到制裁，任何事情都会很快结束。中国已经经历了蜂窝技术（华为）和航空航天（C919 客机）的停摆。根据政治的展开方式，这种破坏的某种形式可以（并且将会）发生在几乎每个产品类别中。
China’s failure to advance has simplified the country’s industrial model somewhat: China uses its hyperfinanced model to drive down the costs of the components that it can produce; it imports the parts it cannot produce, plugs them in, and sends the final product off. But this model only works if external suppliers actively participate. Anything from a security crisis to sanctions ends that pretty quickly. China has already experienced a lockout in cellular tech (Huawei) and aerospace (the C919 passenger jet). Based on how politics unfold, some version of this sort of disruption can (and will) occur in nearly every product category.
最后，还有一个市场邻近性问题：
Finally, there’s a market proximity issue:
亚洲终端产品的两个最大目的地是遥远的美洲和欧洲。美国人横跨太平洋 7,000 英里，而欧洲人——取决于出发地、路线和目的地——9,000-14,000 英里。在后全球化的世界中，期望某些贸易关系能够持续下去是合理的——例如，法国和北非、土耳其和美索不达米亚、德国和斯堪的纳维亚——但地方性将是关键。
The two largest destinations for Asian end products are in faraway America and Europe. The Americans are a cool 7,000 miles across the Pacific, while the Europeans are—depending upon origin, route, and destination—9,000–14,000 miles away. In a post-globalized world it is reasonable to expect some trade relations to last—France and North Africa, Turkey and Mesopotamia, Germany and Scandinavia, for example—but locality will be key.
航运路线越长，任何特定路线上的参与者越多，需要达成的交易就越多，中断的机会也就越多。通过丝绸之路运输的货物如此昂贵的原因之一是没有一个国家控制整条路线。通常情况下，数百个中间商都加了自己的费用，使商品成本增加了 1000 倍或更多。
The longer the shipping route and the more players that lie along any particular route, the more deals that need to be cut and the more opportunity for interruption. One of the reasons the goods transported via the Silk Roads were so expensive was that no single power controlled the entire route. Typically, hundreds of middlemen all added their own fees, inflating the goods cost by a factor of 1,000 or more.
除了日本可能是个例外，没有哪个亚洲强国有海军能力到达这两个大型终端市场中的任何一个，而且在后全球化体系中，亚洲产品不太可能在中国受到欢迎第一名。再加上大多数亚洲人对彼此的普遍厌恶，使该地区摆脱贫困和战争的整个模式注定会崩溃。唯一的问题是是否有人会尝试出去荡秋千。明确地说，“摇摆不定”对供应链安全极为不利。
With the possible exception of Japan, there is no Asian power that has the naval capacity to reach either of the two large end markets in question, and in a post-globalized system it isn’t very likely that Asian product would be very welcome in the first place. Add in the general mutual loathing most Asians feel toward one another and the entire model that has pulled the region out of poverty and war is set to implode. The only question is whether someone will try to go out swinging. And to be crystal clear, “swinging” is exceedingly bad for supply chain security.
欧洲的解体
THE DISASSEMBLY OF EUROPE
有点相似的是，欧洲体系会因为各种原因而动摇。第一个理由既是最明显的，也是最难以控制的：欧洲的婴儿潮先于亚洲开始，欧洲人甚至在新千年之前就已经过了人口无法回头的临界点。比利时、德国、意大利和奥地利都将在 2020 年代上半期进入大规模退休，而从爱沙尼亚到保加利亚的中欧沿线的几乎每个国家都在加速老龄化，并将在下半年老龄化。
Somewhat similarly, the European system will falter for any number of reasons. The first rationale is both the most obvious and the least manageable: Europe’s baby bust started before Asia’s, with the Europeans passing the point of demographic no return even before the new millennium. Belgium, Germany, Italy, and Austria will all age into mass retirement in the first half of the 2020s, while nearly every country in a Central European line from Estonia to Bulgaria is aging even faster and will age out in the second half.
更糟糕的是，仅凭人口统计就可以确保我们所知道的欧洲将在类似的时间表上崩溃。当中欧国家在 2000 年代加入欧盟时，它们成功地说服了西欧国家开放其劳动力市场。中欧地区大约四分之一到三分之一的年轻工人人口为了更好的个人经济前景而迁往西部。底线：西欧的人口数据比实际出现的要糟糕得多。是不是因为中欧人走的时候回国变得艰难，这剥夺了西欧的劳动力，或者因为更多的中欧人在形势变得艰难时前往西欧，因为这些是唯一剩下的工作，自 2008 年以来使欧洲经济运转的劳动力平衡即将消失。
Even worse, demographics alone ensure that Europe as we know it will collapse on a similar time schedule. When the Central European states joined the EU in the 2000s, they succeeded in convincing the Western Europeans to open their labor markets. Some one-fourth to one-third of the young worker population of the Central European region decamped for better personal economic prospects to the west. Bottom line: Western Europe’s demographic figures are far worse than they actually appear. Whether it’s because Central Europeans return home when the going gets tough, which robs Western Europe of its workforce, or because more Central Europeans head to Western Europe when the going gets tough because those are the only jobs left, the labor balance that has enabled European economic functionality since 2008 is about to evaporate.
人口问题以第二种方式困扰着人们。欧洲已经老到不能吸收自己产品的地步。欧洲必须保持高水平的出口才能维持其体系。首选目的地是美国，一个不断向内转的国家，在撰写本文时，它已经逐渐卷入与欧盟的广泛贸易战。美国也（再次，在撰写本文时）探索与英国达成类似的广泛贸易协议。由于任何未来与欧盟的贸易和平都将很快需要伦敦的签署，欧洲大陆的任何人都不应指望轻易纠正。
The demographic problem haunts in a second way. Europe has aged to the point that it cannot absorb its own products. Europe must maintain a high level of exports to maintain its system. The top destination is the United States, a country that is turning ever inward and at the time of this writing is already edging its way into a broad-spectrum trade war with the European Union. The United States is also (again, at the time of this writing) exploring a similarly broad-spectrum trade deal with the United Kingdom. As any future trade peace with the EU will soon require London’s sign-off, no one in continental Europe should count on easy rectification.
没有运往美国的欧洲产品却运往地球的另一端：东北亚。即使在困难重重的情况下，东北亚体系（以及东北亚对欧洲产品的需求）得以幸存，美国人也将不再保证民用海运的海上自由。从上海到汉堡的航线是微风轻拂的 12,000 海里。以现代集装箱船通常以每小时 17 英里的速度快速航行，这是一次很酷的 35 天旅行。任何商业货船可以航行的最快速度是二十五节。这仍然是整整三个星期——在海盗、私掠船、敌对海军或三者兼而有之的海域航行需要花费大量时间。
The European products that do not go to the United States instead travel to the far side of the planet: Northeast Asia. Even if, against all odds, the Northeast Asian system (as well as Northeast Asian demand for European products) survives, the Americans will no longer be guaranteeing freedom of the seas for civilian maritime shipping. The route from Shanghai to Hamburg is a breezy 12,000 nautical miles. At the zippy seventeen miles per hour that modern container ships typically sail at, that’s a cool thirty-five-day trip. The fastest any commercial cargo vessel can sail is twenty-five knots. That’s still three full weeks—a lot of time to spend sailing through waters infested with pirates, privateers, hostile navies, or some combination of the three.
也许更糟糕的是，与中国保持最稳固贸易关系的欧洲部分是德国。德国对中国的产品销售严重偏向用于制造其他产品的机械。. . 出口产品。即使千方百计，德国和中国能够在他们缺乏直接互动的战略影响力的世界中维持贸易关系，中国的出口也不会满足需要，从而破坏任何形式的德中互动的基本原理。
Perhaps even worse, the part of Europe that maintains the most robust trade relationship with the Chinese is Germany. German product sales to China skew very heavily in the direction of machinery used to make other products . . . products for export. Even if, against all odds, Germany and China can maintain a trade relationship in a world where they lack the strategic reach to interact directly, Chinese exports will not be nearly as needed, undermining the base rationale for any sort of German-Chinese interaction.
亚洲人面临的同样广泛的战略问题也同样面临着欧洲人，尽管这些具体问题或多或少受到关注，具体取决于地点和视角。
The same broad strategic issues that face the Asians also face the Europeans, although those particular problems are of less or more concern depending on location and perspective.
首先是“更多”。大多数欧洲国家在 1800 年代开始工业化，即使是落后者——主要是前苏联卫星国——也最迟在 1950 年代开始。这意味着欧洲的大多数矿山至少已经开采了几十年。欧洲人至少经历了几代人的工业化，消耗的材料可能不如亚洲人多，但他们生产的更少。中国人可能会进口他们所需的绝大多数材料，但通常情况下，欧洲人必须全部进口。
First, the “more.” Most European countries started industrializing in the 1800s, with even the laggards—largely the former Soviet satellite states—beginning at the latest in the 1950s. That means most mines in Europe have been tapped out for at least a few decades. The Europeans, having been industrialized for at minimum a couple of generations, may not consume as many materials as the Asians, but they produce even fewer. The Chinese might import the vast majority of the materials they need, but typically, the Europeans must import them all.
现在，“更少”。现代生活所需的大部分工业商品来自比东亚更靠近欧洲的地区——例如西半球和非洲。几个欧洲国家——我想到了法国和英国，但西班牙、荷兰、意大利和丹麦也是如此——拥有足够的海军能力来保护偶尔往返于相关地点的船只。同样好的是，大多数从这些地区到欧洲的航行不太可能经过任何特别有争议的水域。至于西半球的采购，美国人肯定会拒绝在他们的半球进行任何形式的海盗活动或私掠活动，而欧洲商业只要保持非军事化就不太可能被禁止。
Now, the “less.” Most of the industrial commodities required for modern life come from locations far closer to Europe than East Asia—such as the Western Hemisphere and Africa. Several European countries—France and the United Kingdom come to mind, but so too do Spain, the Netherlands, Italy, and Denmark—have sufficient naval capacity to protect occasional shipping to and from the locations in question. Just as good, most sailings from these regions to Europe are unlikely to pass through any particularly contested waters. As to Western Hemispheric sourcing, the Americans are certain to put the kibosh on any sort of piracy or privateering in their hemisphere, and European commerce is unlikely to be barred so long as it remains unmilitarized.
诀窍将来自那些距离欧洲大陆最西端更远的欧洲国家，它们缺乏通道和海军力量。他们必须从不同的“近距离”地点采购材料：俄罗斯。没有美国人，德国就无法保持其富裕自由国家的地位，而没有俄罗斯，德国也无法保持其现代工业化国家的地位。德国和俄罗斯的所有故事都是关于合作和尖锐冲突的交替章节。尽管这对德国人和俄罗斯人来说是灼热的，但对他们之间的人民来说更糟糕——这些国家对德国的制造业供应链至关重要。乌克兰战争已经迫使所有相关人员提出一些棘手的问题。
The trick will come from those European countries farther removed from the Continent’s far west who lack both access and naval forces. They must source materials from a different “close” location: Russia. Germany cannot maintain its position as a wealthy and free nation without the Americans, but Germany also cannot maintain its position as a modern industrialized nation without Russia. The story of all things German and Russian is about alternating chapters of begrudging cooperation and incisive conflict. As searing as that is for the Germans and Russians, it is far worse for the peoples between them—countries essential to Germany’s manufacturing supply chains. The Ukraine War is already forcing some tough questions upon all involved.
当然，即使这一切都假设欧洲内部没有任何问题。欧洲遭受着那些奇怪的地理环境之一的困扰，其中足够多的地方是平坦的，河流充足，步行穿过欧洲大陆的那部分地区相信他们可以而且应该领导一个主要的巩固的权力，而半岛、山区或岛屿的位置刚好足以容纳持不同政见的权力，而这些持不同政见的权力总是会破灭这样的梦想。只有在秩序期间，全球和平与财富才扼杀了两种愿景之间由来已久的竞争。窒息。没有被杀。尽管经历了 75 年的康复、成长、安全、保障、现代化、自由和民主，但许多内部的焦虑和不满仍然存在。发生在全球化最高峰的英国退欧就是一个很好的例子。随着美国的撤退，这种令人窒息的局面结束了。
And of course, even all this assumes nothing goes wrong within Europe. Europe suffers from one of those weird geographies where just enough of it is flat and well rivered and easy to walk across that portions of the Continent are convinced that they can and should lead a major consolidated power, while there are just enough bits that are peninsular or mountainous or island to play host to dissident powers that will always dash such dreams. It’s only during the Order that global peace and wealth smothered the age-old contest between the two visions. Smothered. Not killed. Despite seventy-five years of healing and growth and safety and security and modernization and freedom and democracy, much internal angst and grievance remains. Brexit, occurring at the very height of globalization, is a case in point. With the American withdrawal, that smothering ends.
简而言之，以德国为中心的体系无法维持其目前的地位，更不用说发展了，世界上没有人有拯救它的战略利益。中欧面临的挑战将是防止德国人表现得像一个“正常”国家。德国最近七次这样做，事情得到了。. . 历史的。
Simply put, the Germanocentric system cannot maintain its current position, much less grow, and no one in the world has a strategic interest in bailing it out. The challenge for Central Europe will be to keep the Germans from acting like a “normal” country. The last seven times Germany did, things got . . . historical.
一个亮点：欧洲的附属贸易网络看起来比以德国为中心的体系更有利。
A bit of a bright spot: Europe’s subsidiary trade networks look more favorable than the Germanocentric system.
以瑞典为中心的体系或许能够团结一致。北欧的供应链较少受到潜在威胁，其能源供应更加本地化，其人口老龄化程度较低且老龄化速度较慢，这表明供需之间的匹配更好，这将限制对跨区域进出口的需求第一名。在北海，斯堪的纳维亚人甚至拥有足够的石油和天然气来满足他们几乎所有的需求。他们需要做的“全部”就是以某种方式从遥远的大陆采购他们需要的各种工业投入。
The Sweden-centric system might be able to hold together. Northern Europe’s supply chains are less exposed to potential threats, its energy supplies are more local, and its demographics are less aged and slower-aging, suggesting a better match between supply and demand that would limit the need for extra-regional imports and exports in the first place. In the North Sea the Scandinavians even have sufficient oil and natural gas to meet nearly all their demand. “All” they need to do is somehow source the various industrial inputs they need from a continent away.
他们有两个选择：
They have two options:
首先是至少部分地与法国系统合作。法国除了拥有足够的国内消费来消化自己的生产外，还拥有足够的地理隔离和定位来获得所需的投入。加上称职的远征军和近乎银河系的自尊心，法国可以合理地走自己的路。Sweden & Friends 最好找到一种与法国人一起工作的方法。
The first is to partner with the French system at least in part. In addition to France boasting sufficient domestic consumption to absorb its own production, it also has sufficient geographic insulation and positioning to reach the needed inputs. Add in a competent expeditionary military and a nearly galactic volume of self-regard, and France can reasonably go its own way. Sweden & Friends would do well to find a way to work alongside the French.
第二种选择对斯堪的纳维亚人来说可能更舒服：与盎格鲁人合作。斯堪的纳维亚-英国合作对抗大陆上的一切事物已有数百年历史。随着英国人搬进来美国人（从组织上讲），一些有趣的可能性正在浮出水面。美国人显然拥有比法国人吹嘘的任何东西都更强大的军事和经济。同样，美国人的影响力也大得多——触及可能拥有必要资源的任何地方。美国-墨西哥市场是首屈一指的，而英国市场仍然是欧洲除法国以外最健康的市场（从人口统计学角度来看）。
The second option might feel more comfortable to the Scandinavians: work with the Anglos. Scandinavian-British cooperation against all things continental has a centuries-old history. With the Brits moving in with the Americans (organizationally speaking), some interesting possibilities are surfacing. The Americans obviously have a more powerful military and economy than anything the French boast. The Americans similarly also have far greater reach—reach to anywhere that might have necessary resources. The American-Mexican market is second to none, while the British market remains the healthiest one (demographically speaking) in Europe outside of France.
北美世纪
THE NORTH AMERICAN CENTURY
当谈到北美自由贸易协定体系的命运时，大多数指标看起来都非常积极。
When it comes to the fate of the NAFTA system, most indicators look wildly positive.
让我们从基础结构开始：美国制造商感到被全球化欺骗的部分原因是因为这是计划。该命令的核心戒律是美国将牺牲经济活力以实现安全控制。美国市场本应被牺牲。美国工人应该被牺牲。美国公司应该被牺牲。因此，美国仍在生产的任何产品都是美国市场、工人和公司结构具有超强竞争力的产品集。此外，故意牺牲意味着大多数美国制造的产品不是用于出口，而是用于北美国内消费。
Let’s begin with base structure: part of why American manufacturers feel cheated by globalization is because that was the plan. The core precept of the Order is that the United States would sacrifice economic dynamism in order to achieve security control. The American market was supposed to be sacrificed. The American worker was supposed to be sacrificed. American companies were supposed to be sacrificed. Thus anything that the United States still manufactures is a product set for which the American market, worker, and corporate structure are hypercompetitive. Furthermore, the deliberate sacrifice means that most American manufactured products are not for export, but instead for consumption within North America.
这不是中国的运作方式。中国人制造他们在技术上能够制造的一切，利用补贴、技术盗窃和外交武力，尽可能扩大产品清单。与美国不同的是，其中许多产品用于出口。换句话说，中国人生产的产品是美国人出于某种原因选择不生产的产品。
That’s not how China works. The Chinese make everything that they are technologically capable of making, using subsidies, technology theft, and diplomatic strong-arming to expand the list of products whenever possible. And unlike the United States, many of those products are for export. Put another way, the products the Chinese make are ones that, for whatever reason, the Americans have chosen not to make.
中国的电信公司华为就是一个很好的例子。华为直接通过擅长黑客攻击外国公司的中国政府分支机构，在过去 20 年中一直奉行双重战略：窃取任何可能的技术，购买任何无法复制的技术。特朗普政府实施的制裁（拜登政府加倍下注）在美国公司意识到黑客威胁的同时，阻止了向华为的合法技术转让。结果？华为的企业地位在不到两年的时间里崩塌，从全球最大的手机制造商的风口浪尖跌至中国前五名的地步。没有美国的积极参与，大多数中国公司根本无法运作。
China’s telecom firm Huawei is a case in point. Huawei directly, and via a branch of the Chinese government, which excels at hacking foreign firms, has pursued a dual strategy for two decades: steal whatever tech is possible, and purchase whatever cannot be replicated. Sanctions enacted by the Trump administration (and doubled down upon by the Biden administration) prevented legal tech transfer to Huawei at the same time American firms wised up to the hacking threat. The result? Huawei’s corporate position imploded in less than two years, taking it from being on the cusp of the world’s largest cell phone manufacturer to not even being on the top-five list within China. Most Chinese firms simply cannot function without active American participation.
反之则不然。当然，美国人需要建立他们的工厂来弥补失去的低成本供应商，这说起来容易做起来难，但美国人并不是不知道如何做冶炼之类的事情铝或锻造玻璃或弯曲钢或工艺化油器或组装主板。
The inverse is not true. Sure, the Americans would need to build out their industrial plant to compensate for lost low-cost suppliers, and that is easier and more quickly said than done, but it isn’t like the Americans don’t know how to do things like smelt aluminum or forge glass or bend steel or craft carburetors or assemble motherboards.
然后是贸易准入：将所有进出口加在一起，美国经济仍有约四分之三在国内，限制了它对全球所有事物的敞口。加拿大和墨西哥的一体化程度更高，大约三分之二和四分之三的经济影响来自贸易，但大约四分之三的贸易是与美国的贸易。在北美作为一个单位，10 美元（或比索）的收入中有超过 8 是在该大陆产生的。这是迄今为止世界上绝缘性最好的系统。
Then there’s trade access: add all imports and exports together, and still some three-quarters of the U.S. economy is domestically held, limiting its exposure to all things global. Canada and Mexico are far more integrated, getting roughly two-thirds and three-quarters of their economic heft from trade, but roughly three-quarters of that trade is with the United States. Within North America as a unit, more than 8 in 10 dollars (or pesos) of income is generated within the continent. That’s by far the most insulated system in the world.
除此之外，美国人已经批准、实施和实施了与该国六大贸易伙伴中的另外两个日本和韩国的贸易协定。加上与英国（六个中的另一个）的未决交易，美国贸易组合的整整一半已经纳入后全球化体系。
Beyond that, the Americans have already ratified, operationalized, and implemented trade deals with Japan and South Korea, another two of the country’s six largest trading partners. Add in a pending deal with the United Kingdom (another of the six) and fully half of the United States’ trade portfolio has already been brought into a post-globalized system.
接下来是原材料供应：北美自由贸易协定的合作伙伴在工业商品或能源生产方面都毫不懈怠。所有这些都在全球范围内产生大量的多种工业商品、天然气和石油。更多即将到来。由于全球海上民用运输出现故障，在美国墨西哥湾沿岸进行的大部分原材料生产和中间加工将发现其全球销售潜力有限，原因可能是终端市场崩溃、缺乏安全保障，或两者兼而有之。这将把更多的产出困在北美。如果您是能源生产商或加工商，这不是什么好消息，但如果您是能源产品用户，这就是好消息。与大多数制造商一样。
Next up is raw material supply: none of the NAFTA partners are slouches when it comes to industrial commodity or energy production. All generate globally significant volumes of multiple industrial commodities, natural gas, and oil. More is coming. As global maritime civilian transport fails, much of the raw production and intermediate processing that is done on the U. S. Gulf Coast will find its potential for global sales limited, either due to collapsing end markets, lack of security, or both. That will trap more of the output within North America. That’s not great if you’re an energy producer or processor, but it’s fantastic news if you are an energy product user. As most manufacturers are.
如果需要更多的供应，南美洲是一个坚实的起点。半球以外的采购显然更成问题，但与所有其他制造地区不同，北美拥有以消费为基础的市场，资本、燃料和军队可以走出去获取他们需要的东西。
If more supplies of anything are required, South America is a solid starting point. Extra-hemispheric sourcing is obviously more problematic, but unlike all other manufacturing regions, the North Americans have the consumption-based market and the capital and the fuel and the military reach to go out and get what they need.
让我们谈谈供应链。
Let’s talk supply chains.
过去五年的大多数研究表明，到 2021 年，大多数制造过程在北美的运营成本已经低于亚洲或欧洲。这可能令人震惊，但不需要深入研究就能理解结论。北美系统具有高劳动力差异、低能源成本、低终端消费者运输成本、几乎无限的绿地选址选择、稳定的工业投入供应以及高而稳定的资本供应。
Most studies in the past half decade have indicated that by 2021, most manufacturing processes were already cheaper to operate in North America than in either Asia or Europe. That might shock, but it doesn’t take a deep dive to understand the conclusions. The North American system sports high labor variation, low energy costs, low transport costs to end consumers, nearly unlimited greenfield siting options, stable industrial input supplies, and high and stable capital supplies.
更好的是，北美大陆在自己的海岸和潜在供应商的海岸之间几乎没有面临安全威胁。平均而言，北美产品面临的供应链中断不到德国人可能感受到的供应链中断的三分之一，是亚洲人的十分之一。现在，工业工厂不会免费或一夜之间出现，但北美制造商可能会经历的那种破坏是可以通过的。
Even better, the North American continent faces few security threats between its own shores and those of potential suppliers. On average, North American products face less than one-third the supply chain disruptions the Germans are likely to feel, and one-tenth that of the Asians. Now, industrial plant doesn’t manifest for free, or overnight, but the sorts of disruptions North American manufacturers are likely to experience are the sort that can be grown through.
北美制造业与亚洲和欧洲制造业之间的差距在未来几十年只会越来越大，这在很大程度上是因为发电的不断发展。美国和墨西哥拥有世界上最好的绿色科技选择。大平原上的风，西南部的太阳能。墨西哥在这两方面也都做得很好，尤其是在北部，那里与美国体系的融合程度最高。
That gap between North American manufacturing viability and that of Asian and Europe is only going to increase in the decades to come, in large part because of ongoing evolutions in electricity generation. The United States and Mexico have among the world’s best greentech options. Wind on the Great Plains, solar in the Southwest. Mexico is pretty good on both as well, particularly in the north, where the greatest integration with the American system occurs.
但也许最重要的是，并不是北美的每个人都还没有正式投身制造业。
But perhaps most important of all, not everyone in North America has yet to toss their hat into the manufacturing ring.
首先是千禧一代。美国的千禧一代尽管有许多*缺点是任何发达国家中处于工作年龄的人口中最大的一部分。他们的消费现在正在推动北美体系，就像二十年后他们的投资将推动它一样。因为他们，北美面临的消费和资本紧缩将很快成为亚洲和欧洲的特征。
First up are the Millennials. For all their many* faults, America’s Millennials are the largest chunk of population of any developed country that are of working age. Their consumption is driving the North American system now, just as in twenty years their investment will drive it. Because of them, North America faces nothing like the consumption and capital crunches that will soon define Asia and Europe.
其次，美国的制造业大区并不是很完整（唯一的例外是墨西哥湾沿岸和得克萨斯三角洲）。在全球贸易中断的任何未来，美国联邦、州和地方政府都将在改善这些相互联系方面拥有既得利益。通过这些互连，国内制造系统的集成将更加顺畅和高效。
Second, America’s manufacturing megaregions just aren’t very integrated (the sole exceptions are the Gulf Coast and the Texas Triangle). Any future in which global trade is disrupted is one in which the U.S. federal, state, and local governments will have vested interests in improving those interconnections. With those interconnections will come smoother and more efficient integration of domestic manufacturing systems.
第三，并非所有墨西哥人都在比赛。然而。墨西哥北部城市将全部赌注押在美国一体化上，但墨西哥中部本身就是一个制造业区。与美国人的融合发生了，但它并不像墨西哥北部发生的那样包罗万象。墨西哥南部也没有被卷入。南部是墨西哥最贫穷和技术最不发达的地区，同时在当地公路和铁路以及可能连接南部与该国其他地区的道路和铁路方面的基础设施也最差。
Third, not all of Mexico is playing. Yet. The northern Mexican cities have bet whole hog on American integration, but central Mexico is a manufacturing region in and of itself. Integration with the Americans occurs, but it just isn’t nearly as all-encompassing as what occurs in northern Mexico. Nor is southern Mexico folded in. The south is Mexico’s poorest and least technically advanced region, while also suffering from the worst infrastructure in terms of local roads and rail as well as those that might link the south to the rest of the country.
随着加拿大人、美国人和墨西哥北部人建立一个更加一体化的系统，该系统自然会将其一体化范围扩展到更南端。毕竟，墨西哥城核心拥有超过 7000 万人口，而且其内部的联系比墨西哥北部城市之间的联系要紧密得多。在我们正在进入的世界中，将 7000 万中等收入人群加入任何系统都是最大的胜利。
As the Canadians, Americans, and northern Mexicans build out a more integrated system, that system will naturally extend its integrative reach farther south. The Mexico City core, after all, is home to over 70 million people and is far more linked-up within itself than the northern Mexican cities are to one another. In the world we’re devolving into, adding 70 million middle-income people to any system is about as big a win as can be had.
第四，可能会有一个更大的悬而未决的胜利。英国早在 2016 年就投票决定退出欧盟，但直到 2020 年才真正退出欧盟，直到 2021 年伦敦才意识到它没有为后果做好准备。就像，在所有。欧洲大陆人没有表现出让英国人做出任何让步的倾向，而英国本身也不够大、不够稳定或不够多元化，以至于无足轻重。但加上英国及其先进的北美自由贸易协定分组和数学的第一世界制造能力发生重大变化。将类似北美自由贸易协定的贸易联系更深入地延伸到墨西哥固然很好，但要纳入 6600 万英国人？那可能会更好。两人都在甲板上。
Fourth, there may be a pending win that’s just a touch bigger. The United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union back in 2016 but didn’t actually pull the plug until 2020, and it wasn’t until 2021 that London realized it hadn’t planned for the aftermath. Like, at all. The continental Europeans have shown no propensity to extend the Brits any concessions, and Britain on its own just isn’t big or stable or diversified enough to matter. But add the United Kingdom and its sophisticated first-world manufacturing capacity to the NAFTA grouping and the math changes significantly. Extending NAFTA-esque trade links deeper into Mexico would be great, but incorporating 66 million Brits? That just might be even better. Both are on deck.
有一个问题：最重要的劳动力多样性。英国人的技能组合和劳动力成本与美国人和加拿大人相似，而墨西哥中部人的衡量标准与墨西哥北部人相似。墨西哥二十年的温和增长加上人口逐渐老龄化意味着墨西哥现在需要一个低成本的制造合作伙伴。换句话说，墨西哥需要。. . 一个墨西哥。
There is a problem: that all-important workforce variety. Brits are at a similar skill set and labor cost as Americans and Canadians, while central Mexicans measure up similarly to northern Mexicans. Two decades of moderate growth in Mexico combined with a gently aging demographic means that Mexico now needs a low-cost manufacturing partner. Put another way, Mexico needs . . . a Mexico.
有两种选择。第一个是。. . 不确定。洪都拉斯、危地马拉、萨尔瓦多、哥斯达黎加、尼加拉瓜和巴拿马等中美洲国家已经纳入与美国的贸易协定，称为中美洲自由贸易协定。问题是基础设施。为了将中美洲的低成本和低技能劳动力与美国市场连接起来，在墨西哥山区的整个长度上运行公路和铁路网络似乎是一项艰巨的任务。它肯定不会像得克萨斯三角洲和墨西哥北部之间相对较短的航线那样有利可图。
There are two options. The first is . . . iffy. The Central American states of Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panama are already incorporated into a trade deal with the United States called the Central America Free Trade Agreement. The problem is infrastructure. Running a road and rail network the entire length of Mexico’s mountainous terrain in order to connect Central America’s low-cost and low-skilled workforce to the American market seems like a stretch. It certainly wouldn’t be nearly as lucrative as the relatively short haul between the Texas Triangle and northern Mexico.
这就剩下海上联系了。中美洲国家实际上是独立的城市——每个国家一两个城市——周围环绕着大量的灌木丛。诀窍是找到一个行业，在该行业中，此类劳动力可以获得足够的利润以证明出口是合理的。目前尚不清楚是否有。除了整理工作，即使是纺织品也不太可能是完美的搭配。这限制了该地区仅限于热带农业生产和加工。这不是什么，但也不是很好。这些部门当然无法雇佣足够数量的当地人来使这些国家摆脱“几近失败”的境地。
That leaves sea connections. The Central American countries are in reality individual cities—one or two per country—surrounded by a lot of bush. The trick is to find an industry in which such labor can achieve sufficient profitability to justify export. It is not clear there is one. Outside of finishing work, even textiles are not likely to be a great match. That limits the region to tropical agricultural production and processing. That’s not nothing, but it’s also not great. And those sectors certainly cannot employ sufficient numbers of locals to move these countries out of the “nearly failed” category.
一个更可行的选择是哥伦比亚。与中美洲人一样，哥伦比亚人已经与美国达成贸易协议。与中美洲人不同，哥伦比亚人的劳动力熟练得多，工资水平大约是今天墨西哥的三分之二。最大的挑战是基础设施，这在整个拉丁美洲都是一个相当普遍的挑战。与拥有单一凸起中央高原的墨西哥不同，哥伦比亚有一个 V 型高地，西部是麦德林和卡利市，因此更有可能通过该国的太平洋港口进行整合，而首都波哥大位于东部，更有可能向北看加勒比海岸。
A more viable option is Colombia. Like the Central Americans, the Colombians already have a trade deal with the United States. Unlike the Central Americans, the Colombians have a far more skilled labor force at a wage level that’s roughly two-thirds that of today’s Mexico. The biggest challenge, which is a pretty common challenge throughout Latin America, is infrastructure. Unlike Mexico with its single raised central plateau, Colombia has a V of highlands with the cities of Medellín and Cali on the western leg and so is more likely to integrate via the country’s Pacific ports, while the capital, Bogotá, sits on the eastern leg and is more likely to look north to the Caribbean coast.
至此，全球化已经。. . 粉碎了哥伦比亚的梦想。在哥伦比亚的山上拖着东西上下的困难和成本阻碍了有意义的供应链在国内以及哥伦比亚与更广阔的世界之间的体现。因此，该国主要以出口石油、超硬煤和咖啡而闻名。但在一个生产成本因不稳定而飙升的世界，以及北美对各种工业投入（包括劳动力）的需求激增的世界里，哥伦比亚可能即将迎来好日子。
To this point, globalization has . . . crushed Colombia’s dreams. The difficulty and cost of lugging stuff up and down Colombia’s mountains has prevented meaningful supply chains from manifesting both within the country and between Colombia and the wider world. As such the country is mostly known for exporting oil, superhard coal, and coffee. But in a world where the costs of production skyrocket due to instability, and demand for industrial inputs of all types surges in North America—including labor—Colombia may be about to have its day.
如果哥伦比亚位于世界其他任何地方，谈论与北美有意义的融合将是徒劳的。但在哥伦比亚独特的价格点、独特的地理位置和相对接近的情况下，它或许能够以一种非常亚洲的方式在北美体系中发挥作用：准时制。
If Colombia were located anywhere else in the world, talk of meaningful integration with North America would be a fool’s errand. But between Colombia’s unique price point, its unique geography, and its relative proximity, it just might be able to play in the North American system in a very Asian way: just-in-time.
及时库存的全部基础是各种制造合作伙伴的稳定性非常可靠，以至于您可以将公司的未来押在下一次及时到达的货物上。在亚洲大部分地区，整个概念即将失败。北美自由贸易协定地区并非如此。尽管加拿大、美国和墨西哥存在种种缺陷，但它们没有面临结构性挑战，因此如果它们选择这样做，可以继续使用即时制。哥伦比亚也可以。
The whole basis of just-in-time inventorying is that the stability of the various manufacturing partners is so reliable that you can bet the future of your firm on the next shipment arriving, well, just in time. In most of Asia that entire concept is about to fail. Not so in the NAFTA region. For all their faults, Canada, America, and Mexico face no structural challenges and so can continue to use just-in-time should they choose to do so. So can Colombia.
此外，尽管亚洲（和欧洲）制造业幸存下来，不太可能利用大规模装配线方法所需的规模经济，但北美综合基础设施和更高消费的组合意味着它可能会继续采用装配线和自动化应用有限。北美自由贸易协定三重奏将只需要一些低价值组件的帮助。再次进入哥伦比亚。
In addition, while whatever Asian (and European) manufacturing survives is unlikely to be able to tap the economies of scale required for a mass assembly line approach, North America’s mix of integrative infrastructure and higher consumption means it can probably continue with both assembly lines and limited applications of automation. The NAFTA trio will simply need a bit of help with some of the lower-value components. Once again, enter Colombia.
大多数人认为布雷顿森林体系是一种美式和平。美国世纪，如果你愿意的话。但事实并非如此。该命令的整个概念是，美国为了购买全球联盟的忠诚度而在经济上处于不利地位。这就是全球化。过去几十年不是美国世纪。他们是美国人的牺牲品。
Most people think of the Bretton Woods system as a sort of Pax Americana. The American Century, if you will. But that’s simply not the case. The entire concept of the Order is that the United States disadvantages itself economically in order to purchase the loyalty of a global alliance. That is what globalization is. The past several decades haven’t been an American Century. They’ve been an American sacrifice.
结束了。随着美国撤军，各种结构性、人为支撑整个亚洲和欧洲体系的战略和经济因素正在终结。剩下的消费集中在北美。只有北美的人口结构不需要立即适应全新的、根本上未知的金融现实。因此，大规模制造业向美国体系的回流已经在进行中。
Which is over. With the American withdrawal, the various structural, strategic, and economic factors that have artificially propped up the entire Asian and European systems are ending. What consumption remains is concentrated in North America. Only North America sports a demographic profile that doesn’t have to immediately adapt to a fundamentally new—and fundamentally unknown—financial reality. And so massive manufacturing reshoring to the American system is already in progress.
真正的美国世纪才刚刚开始。
The real, actual American Century is only now beginning.
这并不意味着其他地方不会有制造业。
That hardly means there won’t be manufacturing anywhere else.
新一代轮毂
A NEW CROP OF HUBS
大约 95% 的增值制造业发生在东亚、欧洲或北美。其中大部分是由于我们已经经历过的因素的混合：地理、人口、交通和全球化。
Some 95 percent of value-added manufacturing occurs in East Asia, Europe, or North America. Most of this is due to the mix of factors we’ve already churned through: geography, demographics, transport, and globalization.
但部分原因也是由于政策。
But part of it is also due to policy.
冷战期间，有两个地区在很大程度上避免了全球化。苏联的第一次禁欲是有意为之的。全球化是为了孤立苏联。第二个投弃权票的是拉丁美洲国家巴西，出于政治和意识形态的综合原因，将其制度分开。
During the Cold War, two regions largely abstained from globalization writ large. The first abstinence, that of the Soviet Union, was by design. Globalization was created to isolate the Soviets. The second to abstain, the Latin American country of Brazil, held its systems apart for a mix of political and ideological reasons.
冷战结束后，两国都敞开心扉，尤其是对东亚地区廉价的电子和计算产品。几十年来一直受到保护，俄罗斯人和巴西人都无法与之抗衡。雪上加霜的是，中国人进入两国成立合资企业，并开始从每家公司那里窃取每一点知识产权，其方式甚至会让 Facebook 脸红。*
When the Cold War ended, both opened themselves up, particularly to the inexpensive electronic and computing products of the East Asian Rim. Shielded as they had been for decades, neither the Russians nor the Brazilians could compete. Adding insult to injury, the Chinese entered both countries to form joint ventures, and proceeded to scrape every bit of intellectual property from every firm they could in a manner that would even make Facebook blush.*
到 2005 年，中国人可偷的东西所剩无几。到 2010 年中国已将所有窃取的技术完全整合到他们庞大的制造系统中，并将更便宜的产品推向他们的两个前“合作伙伴”的喉咙，随意压垮曾经是全球领导者的公司。这种情况的某些版本在许多发展中国家发生的程度较低。最重要的是，这就是为什么东亚制造业占全球制造业的一半，而欧洲和北美的制造业强国几乎占据了其余的全部。
By 2005 there was little left for the Chinese to steal. By 2010 the Chinese had fully incorporated all the stolen technology into their massive manufacturing system and were shoving cheaper products down the throats of both of their former “partners,” casually crushing firms that once had been global leaders. Some version of this happened to a lesser degree in much of the developing world. That, more than anything else, is why manufacturing within East Asia makes up some half of global manufacturing, while the powerhouses of Europe and North America comprise almost all of the remainder.
在未来的世界里，俄罗斯和巴西可能会经历一点制造业的复兴。任何鼓励供应链更短、更简单、更贴近消费者的措施都将有利于任何不在东亚或欧洲的制造系统。但即使是这个“可能”也有两个重要的警告。首先，复苏需要俄罗斯人和巴西人解决一系列不相关的问题，从教育系统到基础设施。其次，任何制造更新都将主要限于为俄罗斯和巴西境内的客户提供服务，或者至多为伸手可及的国家/地区提供服务。这不是什么，但这两个国家甚至都没有走上成为下一个中国、墨西哥甚至越南的理论轨道。
In the world to come, Russia and Brazil might experience a bit of a manufacturing renaissance. Anything that encourages supply chains to be shorter, simpler, and closer to consumers will benefit any manufacturing system that is not in East Asia or Europe. But even this “might” comes with a pair of major caveats. First, recovery would require the Russians and Brazilians to address a host of unrelated issues, ranging from educational systems to infrastructure. Second, any manufacturing renewal would largely be limited to servicing customers within Russia and Brazil, or at most, countries within arm’s reach. That’s not nothing, but neither country is even on a theoretical track to becoming the next China, Mexico, or even Vietnam.
中国的末日同样可能帮助撒哈拉以南非洲的主要非制造业经济体。他们都没有希望在成本上与以中国为中心的制造业竞争，但中国消失了吗？本地成功可能有一些空间。仍然存在（许多）问题。非洲大陆由一系列堆叠的高原组成，这几乎阻止了各个国家通过基础设施将自己联系在一起并实现区域规模经济。他们中的很多人也相处不好。他们中也没有任何人享有那种可能使他们能够自己建立大量基础设施的丰富资本结构。但随着中国被排除在外，至少还有一丝希望。最有可能实现突破的国家是那些当地的地理位置可以更容易地在自己的系统内以及与外部世界进行整合的国家：塞内加尔、尼日利亚、安哥拉、南非、肯尼亚和乌干达。其中，尼日利亚——由于人口规模、年轻的人口结构和充足的当地能源生产——看起来处于最佳位置。
The end of China similarly might help out the largely nonmanufacturing economies of sub-Saharan Africa. None of them could hope to compete with China-centric manufacturing on cost, but with China gone? There may be some room for local successes. There are still (many) problems. The African continent is composed of a series of stacked plateaus, which all but prevents the various states from linking themselves together with infrastructure and achieving regional economies of scale. Nor do very many of them get along. Nor do any of them enjoy the sort of rich capital structure that might enable them to build much infrastructure on their own. But with China gone from the equation, there is at least a touch of hope. The countries with the most potential for breakout are those whose local geographies enable easier integration within their own systems as well as with the outside world: Senegal, Nigeria, Angola, South Africa, Kenya, and Uganda. Of these, Nigeria—due to population size, young demographics, and ample local energy production—looks best positioned.
从更乐观的角度来看，三个地区将能够利用改变后的战略环境，大规模进入或重新进入制造业领域。同样的因素组合——人口、劳动力差异、安全、资源获取和运输安全——将决定谁能成功。
On a more upbeat note, there are three regions that will be able to take advantage of the changed strategic circumstances to enter or reenter the world of manufacturing in a big way. The same mix of factors—demographic, labor variation, security, resource access, and transport safety—will determine who can pull it off.
这些地区中的第一个是没有中国的东南亚。它有很多因素。
The first of these regions is Southeast Asia sans China. It has a number of factors going for it.
- 东南亚的劳动力存在明显的差异：新加坡是超高科技和银行业重镇，越南和印度尼西亚是年轻、充满活力的社会，处理低端市场，而泰国和马来西亚占据中间地带。. . 但这是亚洲的中间立场。泰国和马来西亚的经济可以说在技术上比为数众多的欧洲国家和美洲国家更为先进。
- Southeast Asia has labor variation in spades: Singapore is ultra-high-tech and heavy in banking, Vietnam and Indonesia are young, vibrant societies handling the low end, and Thailand and Malaysia occupy the middle ground . . . but this is the Asian middle ground. The Thai and Malaysian economies are arguably more technically sophisticated than a sizable minority of European countries and American states.
- 印度尼西亚、马来西亚、菲律宾、泰国和越南等东南亚国家的城市化进程非常迅速。该地区过度拥挤的城市降低了相对于全球标准的劳动力成本，使东南亚人在任何类型的同类竞争中占据优势。
- The Southeast Asian countries of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam are very rapidly urbanizing. The region’s hypercrowded cities push down the cost of labor relative to global norms, giving the Southeast Asians a leg up in any sort of apples-to-apples competition.
- 该地区许多工业投入品供应合理；最值得注意的是，它的石油和天然气需求几乎可以自给自足。缅甸尤其拥有大量尚未工业化生产的矿物，而巴布亚新几内亚实际上开采了有用的材料。对于该地区无法自行生产的产品，它可以依赖澳大利亚，它在煤炭、锂、铁矿石、镍和铀方面处于世界领先地位。
- The region has reasonable supplies of many industrial inputs; most notably it is nearly self-sufficient for its oil and natural gas needs. Myanmar in particular has loads of minerals that have yet to be industrially produced, while Papua New Guinea practically bleeds useful materials. For what the region cannot produce itself it can rely upon Australia, a world leader in coal, lithium, iron ore, nickel, and uranium.
- 虽然说该地区的每个人总是相处融洽有点牵强，但该地区地理的本质——密布丛林、山脉、半岛和岛屿——使得当地人除了边界之外很难拥有任何东西小冲突。最后一次有意义的战斗是越南 1980 年代入侵柬埔寨，并坦率地说，那场冲突根本没有推动经济发展。柬埔寨以前是无处可去，现在仍然是无处可去。
- While it would be a stretch to say that everyone in the region always gets along, the very nature of the regional geography—heavy on jungles, mountains, peninsulas, and islands—makes it very difficult for the locals to have anything more than a border skirmish. The last meaningful fight was Vietnam’s 1980s invasion of Cambodia, and to be blunt, that conflict didn’t move the economic needle at all. Cambodia was a nowhere before, and a nowhere it remains.
该地区有几个明显的弱点，在我看来，这些弱点是完全可以控制的。
The region has a couple of significant weaknesses that, in my opinion, are perfectly manageable.
首先，由于每个人都住在（并继续搬到）城市，而且热带土壤肥力有限，该地区没有自给自足的希望。幸运的是，澳大利亚和新西兰的大量农业出口商就在隔壁，而整个西半球的农业资源直接横跨太平洋。
First, with everyone living in (and continuing to move to) cities, and with tropical soils being of limited fertility, this region has no hope of feeding itself. Luckily, the mass agricultural exporters of Australia and New Zealand are right next door, while the agricultural bounty of the entire Western Hemisphere is a straight shot across the Pacific.
其次，东南亚没有明显的领导者。新加坡是最富有的，但也是最小的。印度尼西亚是最大的，但也是最贫穷的。泰国人最“赞同”，除非他们正在进行周期性的军事政变。*越南人是最有组织的，但那是因为他们的政府是近乎独裁的。这不仅仅是谁为地区代言的问题，更是谁能维护海上通道安全的问题？这项任务在很大程度上超出了当地人的范围。
Second, there is no obvious leader within Southeast Asia. Singapore is the richest, but also the smallest. Indonesia is the biggest, but among the poorest. The Thais are the most “with it,” unless they’re having one of their periodic military coups.* The Vietnamese are the most organized, but that’s because their government is borderline dictatorial. This isn’t simply an issue of asking who speaks for the region, but also, who can maintain sea-lane security? That task is largely beyond the locals.
幸运的是，这方面也有帮助。日本海军的远程作战能力很强——用具有防御意识的书呆子的白话来说就是蓝水——并且可以相当轻松地在该地区巡逻。重要的是要注意，这不是日本帝国时代。不会有帝国入侵。东南亚大部分地区在经济发展方面可能比日本落后一两代人，但所有重要的国家都已完全工业化。这将是一种防御伙伴关系，而不是占领。
Luckily, there’s help at hand for this as well. Japan’s navy is very long-range capable—blue-water in the vernacular of defense-minded wonks—and could patrol the region fairly easily. It’s critical to note that this is not the age of Imperial Japan. There will be no imperial invasions. Most of Southeast Asia may be a generation or two behind the Japanese in terms of economic development, but all the countries that matter are fully industrialized. This would be a defense partnership, not an occupation.
接下来是印度。在运作方式上，印度有点像中国。它是一个幅员辽阔、幅员辽阔的国家，人口稠密的地区之间存在巨大差异。班加罗尔走廊是技术服务领域的早期进入者，而该国在石油精炼、重化学品、仿制药生产和快速周转消费品方面也很出色。
Next up is India. In the ways that work, India is a bit like China. It is a huge, sprawling country with wild variation among its heavily populated regions. The Bangalore corridor was an early entrant into the world of tech servicing, while the country also excels at petroleum refining, heavy chemicals, generic drug production, and fast-turnaround consumer goods.
印度的问题在于它可能有点过于多样化和人口过于稠密。印度不是像中国、越南、法国或波兰那样由一个族群主导人口和政府的种族定义的民族国家，而是拥有比除非洲以外的任何大陆都更多的种族和语言多样性。这些种族中的许多人不仅仅拥有自己的文化；他们有自己的政府。这些政府经常对国家政策行使否决权——有时是正式的，有时是非正式的。反之亦然。这不是一个主张良好联系和顺畅业务关系的设置。
India’s problem is that it might be a bit too varied and too heavily populated. India is not an ethnically defined nation-state like China or Vietnam or France or Poland, in which one group dominates the population and the government, but instead boasts more ethnic and linguistic diversity than any continent save Africa. Many of these ethnicities don’t simply have their own cultures; they have their own governments. These governments often exercise vetoes—sometimes formal, sometimes informal—over national policies. The reverse is often true as well. It isn’t a setup that argues for great connections and smooth business relations.
这就是印度一千年半以来的样子。没有什么比我们所知道的世界崩溃那么小的事情会改变它。但是，如果全球联系动摇，印度标志性的官僚作风就不会像缺乏长途海上运输那样成为大问题。至少，改变后的环境将使印度能够建立自己的制造能力，为本国 14 亿人口提供服务。仅凭印度的规模就意味着它不必成为全球参与者也能在全球范围内发挥重要作用。
This is what India has looked like for a millennium and a half. Nothing as minor as the collapse of the world we know is going to change it. But if global connections falter, India’s trademark snarled bureaucracy just isn’t going to be as big a problem as a lack of long-distance maritime transport. At a minimum the changed circumstances will enable India to build out its manufacturing capacity to serve its own 1.4 billion strong population. India’s size alone means it doesn’t have to be a global player to be globally significant.
东南亚和印度的共同问题将是资金供应。由于这两位球员的人口统计都相对年轻，因此当地资本的产生有些薄弱。由于两者都受制于复杂而多裂的地形——所有那些丛林、山脉、半岛和岛屿——建设补偿性基础设施的资本需求很高，而陆基基础设施连接该地区各种劳动力的机会充其量也很薄弱。两者都会随着中国的分崩离析，许多制造网络的许多部分都被吸收了，但工业厂房仍然需要建造——这不是免费的。除了新加坡之外，这些经济体都没有硬通货或稳定的股票市场。即使它们能够保持政治和宏观经济的稳定，它们也不会成为资本外逃的目的地。
A common problem for both Southeast Asia and India will be capital supply. Since both players sport relatively young demographics, local capital generation is somewhat thin. Since both suffer from complex and riven terrain—all those jungles and mountains and peninsulas and islands—the need for capital to build compensating infrastructure is high, and the opportunities for land-based infrastructure to link up the region’s various workforces are weak at best. Both will pick up many pieces of many manufacturing networks as China breaks down and up, but the industrial plant will still need to be built—and that is not free. With the notable exception of Singapore, none of these economies have hard currencies or stable stock markets. Even if they can maintain political and macroeconomic stability, they will not be destinations for capital flight.
他们都需要的是外国直接投资（FDI）。FDI 背后的概念很简单：购买或建造特定设施（通常是工业厂房）以生产特定产品的资金。解决东南亚和印度资本问题的办法很可能是一样的：日本。日本劳动力正在迅速老龄化日本的消费在 30 年前达到顶峰。但是日本人仍然很忙。虽然他们的劳动力不会靠自己或为自己建造太多东西，但他们仍然非常有能力设计在其他地方制造的产品，并为工厂支付费用以实现这一切。将日本的科技和军事实力与财富与印度和东南亚的制造业潜力以及人口和工业投入结合起来，你们就拥有了 21 世纪的伟大联盟之一。
What they all need is foreign direct investment (FDI). The concept behind FDI is simple: money to purchase or build specific facilities—typically industrial plant—in order to produce a specific product. The solution to Southeast Asian and Indian capital problems is likely the same: Japan. The Japanese workforce is rapidly aging into obsolescence and Japanese consumption peaked three decades ago. But the Japanese are still loaded. While their workforce isn’t going to be building much by or for themselves, they are still eminently capable of designing products to be manufactured elsewhere and paying for the industrial plant to make it all happen. Combine Japanese tech and military strength and wealth with India and Southeast Asia’s manufacturing potential and demographic and industrial inputs and you have one of the great alliances of the twenty-first century.
问题是是否会邀请其他人参加聚会。韩国人将是一个合乎逻辑的选择，但他们对 1905-45 年占领韩国的日本人怀恨在心，就像他们在高科技制造业方面一样。尚不清楚完全缺乏满足自身需求的海军能力的韩国人是否愿意在后美国世界中与日本人接触。相比之下，台湾是一个灌篮高手。台湾人和日本人本能地对北京抱有敌意，自朝鲜战争结束以来一直在所有工业领域进行合作。
The question is whether anyone else will be invited to join the party. The Koreans would be a logical choice, but they are just as expert at holding grudges against the Japanese for the 1905–45 occupation of Korea as they are at high-tech manufacturing. It isn’t clear that the Koreans, who utterly lack the naval capacity to look after their own needs, will be willing to reach out to the Japanese in a post-American world. Taiwan, in contrast, is a slam-dunk partner. The Taiwanese and Japanese instinctively share a hostile view of Beijing and have been collaborating on all things industrial since the end of the Korean War.
还有一个值得一看的地区：布宜诺斯艾利斯。
There is one more region worth looking at: Buenos Aires.
对于你们这些熟悉阿根廷的人，我敢肯定你们认为我中风了。阿根廷拥有世界上对投资者最不友好的监管和关税制度，而且该国公然没收私有财产的嗜好已经破坏了当地的制造业基地。都是真的。所有相关的。. . 为了这个正在死去的世界。但在这个正在诞生的世界，一个分裂成区域甚至国家贸易体系的世界，阿根廷的社会主义兼法西斯产业政策将发挥更好的作用。毕竟，如果廉价的制成品不再容易从东亚获得，阿根廷人将要么放弃，要么在当地制造一些东西。阿根廷人讨厌离开。
For those of you familiar with Argentina, I’m sure you think I’ve suffered a stroke. Argentina has among the world’s most investor-unfriendly regulatory and tariff regimes, and the country’s penchant for flat-out confiscating private property has wrecked its local manufacturing base. All true. All relevant . . . for the world that’s dying. But in the world that’s being born, a world fracturing into regional and even national trade systems, Argentina’s socialist-cum-fascist industrial policy will work much better. After all, if cheap manufactured products are no longer easily available from East Asia, the Argentines will either need to go without or make some stuff locally. And the Argentines hate going without.
这可能会导致显着的区域工业繁荣。阿根廷人是世界上受教育程度最高的人之一，因此问题从来都不是智力问题。布宜诺斯艾利斯地区也靠近巴拉圭、乌拉圭和巴西南部的廉价劳动力市场。拥有 4500 万阿根廷人的本地市场值得一试，而南锥体的其他地区——阿根廷基础设施已经存在的地区已经链接到——增加了将近十亿的四分之一。合并后的南锥体也是太阳下几乎所有农业和工业产品的主要生产国，东半球没有一个有能力打破美国在西半球的安全警戒线。在一个很快将面临从食品到工业加工再到连贯和可持续的制造系统的一切短缺的世界中，Argentina & Friends 勾选了所有方框。
That’s likely to lead to a significant regional industrial boom. Argentines are among the world’s most educated people, so the issue has never been intellectual capacity. The Buenos Aires region is also within reach of cheaper labor markets in Paraguay, Uruguay, and southern Brazil. The local market of 45 million Argentines is worth going after, and the rest of the Southern Cone—the region that preexisting Argentine infrastructure already links to—adds in nearly a quarter of a billion more. The combined Southern Cone is also a major producer of nearly every agricultural and industrial product under the sun, and there is no one in the Eastern Hemisphere with the capacity of breaking the American security cordon around the Western Hemisphere. In a world that will soon face shortages in everything from foodstuffs to industrial processing to coherent and sustainable manufacturing systems, Argentina & Friends checks all the boxes.
这就是哪里。现在让我们看看如何。毕竟，我们正在进入的世界不仅会在不同的地方以不同的规模制造东西，而且还会以不同的方式制造东西。
So that’s the where. Now let’s look at the how. After all, the world we’re devolving into will manufacture things not simply in different places and on different scales, but also in different ways.
制造新世界
Manufacturing a New World
供应链越长、越复杂，就越有可能面临灾难性的、无法恢复的故障。
The longer and more complex the supply chain, the more likely it is to face catastrophic, irrecoverable breakdown.
这句话包含了很多焦虑和混乱。
That single statement contains a lot of angst and disruption.
从全球化世界的制造规范演变为去全球化世界的新规范，不会像拆解汽车然后在新地点重新组装一样。这就像拆解汽车，然后将其重新组装成面包机、苹果采摘机和芭比梦幻喷气式飞机。我们用来制造东西的过程会改变，因为环境会改变。全球规模经济将消失。我们在全球化条件下用来制造商品的许多技术将不适用于新兴的支离破碎的世界。
Evolving from the manufacturing norms of the globalized world to the new norms of a deglobalized one will not be like disassembling a car and then reassembling it in a new location. It will be like disassembling a car and then reassembling it as a bread maker, an apple picker, and a Barbie dream jet. The processes we use to manufacture things will change because the environment will change. Global economies of scale will vanish. Many of the technologies we use to manufacture goods under globalization will not prove applicable to the fractured world emerging.
这意味着我们，在 2022 年的今天，有很多工厂将不再相关。
That means that we, today in 2022, have a lot of industrial plant that just won’t be relevant much longer.
以中国为例：2021 年中国的制造业总附加值约为 4 万亿美元，其中约四分之三用于出口。基础工业厂房的原始价值很容易是它的十倍，这还不包括配套的交通和电力基础设施，也不包括将投入品进出该国的数千艘远程船舶，也不包括支持相互依赖的供应系统的价值涉及整个东亚其他国家。
Consider China: Total manufacturing value-add in China in 2021 was right around $4 trillion, some three-quarters of which were for export. The raw value of the underlying industrial plant is easily ten times that, not counting supporting transport and power infrastructure, nor the thousands of long-range ships that shuttle inputs into and end products out of the country, nor the value of supporting codependent supply systems that involve other countries throughout East Asia.
一切都会搁浅。去全球化——无论是由美国撤军还是人口崩溃引发的——都将打破使大多数以中国为中心的制造业成为可能的供应链，甚至在消费国更加小心翼翼地保护本国市场之前。几乎整个出口驱动型工业厂房（而不是国内驱动的工业厂房的一小部分）将被注销。完全地。
It is all going to become stranded. Deglobalization—whether triggered by the American withdrawal or demographic collapse—will break the supply links that make most China-centric manufacturing possible, even before consuming nations more jealously protect their home markets. Pretty much the entire export-driven industrial plant (and a not small portion of the domestically driven industrial plant) will be written off. Completely.
并非所有这些都需要更换。人口下降意味着全球消费在 2019 年 COVID 前的黄金时期达到顶峰，而全球体系的分裂将进一步降低全球整体收入和财富水平。但在许多较小的碎片中，将需要建造替代工业厂房。毕竟，开发成品的全球市场将不再是一个可行的选择。
Not all of it will need to be replaced. Demographic decline means global consumption peaked back in the golden pre-COVID days of 2019, while the fracturing of the global system will further reduce overall global income and wealth levels. But within many of those smaller fragments, there will be a need to build replacement industrial plant. After all, tapping the global market for finished goods will no longer be a viable option.
这个新工厂的特点将反映出一个根本不同的宏观经济、战略、金融和技术环境。根据工厂所在的位置，它会有所不同，但它们都会存在一些共同特征。
The characteristics of this new industrial plant will reflect a fundamentally different macroeconomic, strategic, financial, and technological environment. It will be a bit different based on where that plant is located, but some common characteristics will exist across them all.
- 大规模生产的装配线已基本淘汰。任何类型的大规模生产都需要大规模的规模经济。即使在北美市场，这种生产“仅”需要服务于大约 5 亿人，经济总量约为 25 万亿美元。是的，这很多，但这只是 COVID 之前全球总量的三分之一，北美自由贸易协定国家将主要为自己生产，而不是为全世界生产。
- Mass-production assembly lines are largely out. Mass production of any type requires massive economies of scale. Even within the North American market, such production “only” needs to serve about a half billion people, with a combined economy of about $25 trillion. Yes, that’s a lot, but it’s but one-third of the pre-COVID global total and the NAFTA countries will be producing primarily for themselves, not for the world writ large.
- 降低规模经济会减少自动化的机会。将新技术应用于任何制造系统都会增加成本，自动化也不例外。它仍然会发生，但只会发生在纺织品和先进半导体等目标应用中。这种自动化应用程序已经比人工便宜。
- Reducing economies of scale reduces the opportunities for automation. Applying new technology to any manufacturing system adds cost, and automation is no exception. It will still happen, but only in targeted applications such as textiles and advanced semiconductors. Such automated applications are already cheaper than human labor.
- 制造业技术进步的步伐将放缓。让我更广泛地说：所有技术改进的步伐都会放缓。快速的技术进步需要大量高技能工人、这些工人之间进行大规模合作的机会，以及用于支付新想法的开发、运营和应用的大量资金。人口崩溃正在破坏第一个，去全球化正在破坏第二个，合并后的两个正在结束第三个。
- The pace of technological improvement in manufacturing will slow. Let me make that broader: the pace of all technological improvement will slow. Rapid tech advancement requires a large body of highly skilled workers, the opportunities for large-scale collaboration among those workers, and a metric butt-ton of capital to pay for the development, operationalization, and application of new ideas. Demographic collapse is gutting the first, deglobalization is fracturing the second, and the combined pair are ending the third.
- 供应链将短得多。在一个断开连接的世界中，任何暴露点都是故障点，任何无法消除自身复杂性的制造系统都无法生存。几十个地理上孤立的供应商汇集到一个单一的、庞大的供应链中的模式将会消失。相反，成功的制造将扭曲成两个相互支持的新形状。第一个将在个别地点执行更多步骤，以尽可能消除供应链风险。这表明此类核心设施将变得更大。第二种制造将是提供定制零件的微型设施。机加工车间尤其应该蓬勃发展。他们可以快速吸收资金和技术以及新设计和新工人，
- Supply chains will be much shorter. In a disconnected world, any point of exposure is a failure point and any manufacturing system that cannot snuff out its own complexity is one that will not survive. The model of dozens of geographically isolated suppliers feeding into a single, sprawling supply chain will vanish. Instead, successful manufacturing will twist into two new, mutually supportive shapes. The first will carry out more steps within individual locations in order to eliminate as much supply chain risk as possible. This suggests that such core facilities will become far larger. The second sort of manufacturing will be tiny facilities that supply customized parts. Machine shops in particular should thrive. They can quickly absorb capital and technology and new designs and new workers, and crank out customized or rapidly changing parts for use in those larger, core facilities.
- 生产将与消费共存。随着全球地图的分裂，服务消费市场意味着在该市场内生产商品。对于更小和更孤立的市场，这表明由于完全缺乏规模经济以及难以采购必要范围的输入材料而导致的极端生产成本。更大的系统（想到北美自由贸易协定）会做得更好。毕竟，来自犹他州的投入可用于在多伦多制造可在尤卡坦半岛销售的产品。“托管”是相对的。
- Production will become colocated with consumption. With the global map fracturing, serving a consumer market means producing goods within that market. For smaller and more isolated markets, this suggests extreme production costs due to an utter lack of economies of scale, as well as difficulty sourcing the necessary range of input materials. Larger systems (NAFTA comes to mind) will do much better. After all, inputs sourced in Utah can be used to build a product in Toronto that can be sold in the Yucatan. “Colocation” is relative.
- 正如旧系统重视成本和效率一样，新系统将重视简单性和安全性。准时制的消亡将迫使制造商做两件事中的一件。选项 A 是将大量产品（包括成品）存放在制造过程中尽可能靠前的位置，最好是在主要人口中心的最边缘。选项 B 是尽可能多地放弃传统制造过程，并在尽可能靠近最终消费者的地方进行全包式制造。适合后者的一种技术是增材制造或 3D 制造，其想法是将粉末状或液化材料一遍又一遍地喷涂成薄层，直到产品被“打印”出来。是的，增材制造在每个产品的绝对值上是昂贵的，但目标已经改变。
- The new systems will put premiums on simplicity and security just as the old system put premiums on cost and efficiency. The death of just-in-time will force manufacturers to do one of two things. Option A is to warehouse masses of product—including finished product—as far forward in the manufacturing process as possible, preferably at the very edge of major population centers. Option B is to abandon as much of the traditional manufacturing process as possible and do all-in manufacturing as physically close to the end consumer as possible. One technology suited to the latter is additive or 3-D manufacturing, the idea being that a powdered or liquefied material is sprayed in thin layers over and over again until a product is “printed.” Yes, additive manufacturing is expensive in per-product absolute terms, but the goalposts have moved. Cost is no longer the driving focus, and any 3-D-printed products by definition will have next to zero warehousing costs.
- 劳动力将大不相同。在交替强调定制和在一个位置执行多个制造步骤之间，对于不知道自己在做什么的人来说没有太多空间。工业时代的一大收获是，低技能劳动力可以在流水线上工作，过上合理的生活。但现在？制造业对低技能工作的需求将会消失，而高技能工作的回报将会飙升。对于穷国来说，这将是一场灾难。提升增值规模意味着从底部开始。在地缘政治权力下放、人口倒置和技术变革之间，这些工作中的大部分将不复存在。此外，更短，更简单的供应链将减少一般制造业的整体就业，以生产每单位产品的就业岗位衡量。最后的结果？国家内部和国家之间的不平等加剧。
- The workforce will be very different. Between an alternating emphasis on customization and carrying out multiple manufacturing steps in one location, there isn’t much room for people who don’t know what they are doing. One of the great gains of the Industrial Age was that low-skilled labor could make a reasonable living working on an assembly line. But now? Demand for the lowest-skilled jobs within the manufacturing space will evaporate, while rewards for the highest-skilled jobs will soar. For poor countries, this will be a disaster. Moving up the value-add scale means starting at the bottom. Between geopolitical devolutions, demographic inversions, and technological changes, most of those jobs will no longer exist. In addition, shorter, simpler supply chains will reduce overall employment in manufacturing in general as measured in terms of jobs per unit of product produced. The end result? Widening inequality both within and among countries.
- 不是每个人都能玩。世界上每一个支离破碎的地方都需要依靠自己的内部制造系统，而许多地方都缺乏这种能力。建造工业厂房的资本要求很高。人口老龄化将限制欧洲内部的选择。对资本转移的可能限制将限制整个非东亚发展中国家的选择。最能利用外部资本的地区将是那些最有可能利用资源、可靠地生产产品，甚至可能向地区外销售一些产品的地区：东南亚、印度和大布宜诺斯艾利斯地区。唯一有可能完全自筹资金建设自己的地区是北美自由贸易协定。
- Not everyone can play. Each fractured piece of the world will need to look to its own internal manufacturing system, and many will lack the capacity. The capital requirements for building out industrial plant are steep. Demographic aging will limit options within Europe. Likely restrictions on capital transfers will limit options throughout the non–East Asian developing world. The regions that can best tap outside capital will be those with the best prospects for tapping resources, producing products reliably, and maybe even selling a few out-of-region: Southeast Asia, India, and the Greater Buenos Aires region. The only region likely to be able to fully self-fund its own buildout is NAFTA.
- 最后，也是最令人沮丧的是，在我们所处的这个世界上，有各种各样的失败者。如果你的国家失去制造系统是一回事，因为其他人拥有更好的成功地理来制造这个或那个正在发展的时代的小部件。改变交通、金融、能源或工业材料的地图，赢家或输家的名单将随之改变。对于失败者来说，这不是一个令人高兴的结果，但这不是世界末日。除非是。访问价格上涨和绝对无法访问之间存在差异——一个很大的差异。第一个导致工业空心化。第二个导致彻底的去工业化。就像能源一样，失去使用权的国家现代工业社会的基石不只是进入衰退，他们根本失去了玩游戏的能力。
- Finally, and most depressingly, there are different sorts of losers in this world we are devolving into. It is one thing if your country loses a manufacturing system because someone else has a better Geography of Success for making this or that widget in the age unfolding. Change the map of transport, or finance, or energy, or industrial materials, and the list of winners or losers will shift with it. That’s not a happy outcome for the loser, but it isn’t the end of the world. Unless it is. There is a difference—a big difference—between a rising price of access and an absolute lack of access. The first leads to an industrial hollowing out. The second leads to outright deindustrialization. Just as with energy, countries that lose access to the building blocks of modern industrial society do not just enter recession, they lose the capacity to play the game at all.
现在让我们谈谈产品。
Now let’s talk products.
整个制造领域实际上有数百个子部门，每个子部门都包含数千种中间产品和最终产品。仅仅列出它们的全部，就会比整本书杀死更多的树。出于简洁和环境保护的考虑，我们将重点关注国际贸易额排名前 11 位的国家。
There are literally hundreds of subsectors across the manufacturing space, comprising thousands of intermediate and end products each. Just a list of them all would slay more trees than this entire book. In the interest of brevity and environmental preservation, we are going to focus on the top eleven in terms of internationally traded value.
国际制成品贸易中最大的一块是汽车。每辆车的所有这 30,000 个零件都有自己的供应链。由于每个部分都有自己的劳动力需求和成本结构，许多国家生产很多步骤，并经常充当彼此品牌和市场的供应商。在福特汽车中找到德国变速器或在吉利汽车中找到墨西哥发动机缸体或在宝马汽车中找到马来西亚线路是非常标准的。
The single biggest piece of international manufactures trade is automotive. All those 30,000 parts per vehicle have their own supply chains. Since each part has its own labor requirements and cost structure, a lot of countries produce a lot of steps and often serve as suppliers to one another’s brands and markets. It is pretty standard to find a German transmission in a Ford or a Mexican engine block in a Geely or Malaysian wiring in a BMW.
当然，这种水平的工业相互作用正在完全消失。这并不像听起来那么灾难性。因为每个人都构建了一点，任何现有供应链系统集中的地方都会产生显着的网络效应，假设消费者对最终产品有足够的需求。在 2018 年汽车销量达到顶峰的中国，这很糟糕。在几十年前达到顶峰的欧洲，情况更糟。但得克萨斯-墨西哥轴心有点完美。当 25,000 个零件已经在世界上最大的汽车市场的一个相当紧凑的地理范围内生产（或组装）时，添加每个单独的剩余零件的经济性并不是特别令人生畏。
Of course that level of industrial interplay is totally going away. This isn’t quite as disastrous as it sounds. Because everyone builds a bit of everything, any place where existing supply chain systems are concentrated generates significant network effects, assuming there is sufficient consumer demand for the end product. In China, where vehicle sales peaked in 2018, this is bad. In Europe, where it peaked decades ago, this is worse. But the Texas–Mexico axis is kind of perfect. When 25,000 of the parts are already produced (or assembled) within a fairly tight geography that is within the world’s largest car market, the economics of adding each individual remaining part are not particularly daunting.
重型车辆制造——主要是农场、采矿和建筑设备——在许多方面都遵循与汽车相同的模式。许多国家生产许多不同的产品，并来回翻转中间投入。零件是零件是零件。. .
Heavy vehicle manufacturing—primarily farm, mining, and construction equipment—in many ways follows the same pattern as automotive. Lots of countries produce lots of different pieces and flip their intermediate inputs back and forth. Parts is parts is parts . . .
. . . 但只是在一定程度上。在数十亿人想要一辆汽车的地方，并不是每个人都觉得有必要冲出去挑选最新最好的挖掘机。还有一个远非次要的问题是你无法欺骗某些东西合并成一个标准容器单元的大小。仅运输困难就意味着大多数需要农业、采矿或建筑设备的地方都需要自己制造大量设备。
. . . but only to a point. Where billions of people want a car, not everyone feels the need to rush out and pick up the latest and greatest backhoe. There’s also the far from minor point that you cannot finagle something the size of a combine into a standard container unit. Shipping difficulties alone mean that most locations that need farming or mining or construction equipment need to manufacture a lot of it themselves.
总的来说，重型设备有点像汽车的缩影。与汽车一样，重型设备制造业存在于三大制造中心——东亚、欧洲和北美——它们都主要服务于自己的区域市场，但也为彼此的系统提供超过五分之一的组件。由于关税壁垒和必要性的综合作用，次要大国——比如阿根廷、巴西和俄罗斯——已经设法保留了自己的重型设备制造系统。
Taken together, heavy equipment is a bit like automotive in microcosm. Like automotive, heavy equipment manufacturing exists in the three big manufacturing hubs—East Asia, Europe, and North America—each of which both largely serves its own regional markets, but also provides upwards of one-fifth of components for one another’s systems. Secondary powers—think Argentina, Brazil, and Russia—have managed to preserve their own heavy equipment manufacturing systems due to a mix of tariff barriers and necessity.
展望未来，德国系统将完全被淹没。德国的人口太过落后，无法维持生产；它与其他人口过剩的国家过于融合，无法维持其供应链；它过于依赖工业商品进口，甚至无法尝试大规模制造；它过于依赖大陆外的出口以维持收入流动。
Moving forward, the German system will be absolutely hosed. Germany’s demographics are too terminal to maintain production, it is too integrated with other terminally demographic countries to maintain its supply chains, it is too hooked upon industrial commodities imports to even attempt large-scale manufacturing, and it is too dependent upon extra-continental exports to maintain revenue flows.
日夜不同的是巴西。更容易获得能源和材料。一个主要是本土产业，从车轮上建立起来，对任何其他国家的问题的影响最小。再加上国内对建筑、农业和采矿设备的巨大需求，随着其他国家退出该行业，巴西的海外销售可能会扩大。
Night-and-day-different is Brazil. Easier energy and material access. A largely homegrown industry that builds from the wheels up with minimal exposure to any other country’s issues. Add in a hefty need domestically for construction and agricultural and mining equipment and Brazil might see an expansion in sales abroad as other countries fall out of the industry.
在供应链的安全性、国内需求、材料获取的安全性和人口结构方面，坐在德国人和巴西人之间的是意大利人、法国人和日本人。出于国家原因（较小的农田和拥挤的城市需要较小的设备），意大利的产量倾向于较小的模型，巧合的是更容易出口。法国的系统几乎囊括了所有的国内销售，但仍然大量依赖出口。法国和日本模特如果不能与美国人保持良好的关系，他们的翅膀就会被剪掉，美国人是两国最受欢迎的最终目的地。挑战不在于需求，而在于获取。中国面临着同样问题的类似版本（尽管不那么严重）（中国的内部需求远高于法国或日本）。
Sitting in between the Germans and Brazilians as regard to supply chain sanctity, domestic demand, the security of materials access, and demographic structures are the Italians, French, and Japanese. Italy’s output tends toward smaller models for national reasons (smaller farm fields and congested cities require smaller equipment), which coincidentally are easier to export. France’s system has captured nearly all domestic sales, but remains heavily export-geared. The French and Japanese models will have their wings clipped if they cannot maintain excellent relations with the Americans, the most popular end destination for both. The challenge is less about need and more about access. China faces a similar, if less intense, version of the same problem (internal demand in China is far higher than in France or Japan).
尽管如此，拥有 80% 的矿用卡车和拥有全部的东西还是有很大区别的。幸运的是，任何精通汽车的人都应该能够证明自己精通重型设备。许多相同的技能组合和基础设施要求都适用。在北美，寻找采矿和建筑设备的得克萨斯-墨西哥轴线，尤其是休斯敦。想要农具吗？它仍然是你追求的中西部。
Still, there’s a big difference between having 80 percent of a mining truck and having the whole thing. Luckily, anyone who is pretty good at automotive should be able to prove pretty good at heavy equipment. Many of the same skill sets and infrastructure requirements apply. Within North America, look to the Texas–Mexico axis for mining and construction gear, and Houston in particular. Want farm equipment? It’ll still be the Midwest you’re after.
木材行业*以复杂多变的方式横跨农业和制造业。从树木到木材再到纸浆（或木板、芳香剂或木板）的增值过程加起来高达四分之一万亿美元的商品，甚至在将木材转化为家具、单板或木板的真正工作开始之前古龙水或室内胆量或木炭。正如您可能猜到的那样，绘制木材行业的未来——地狱，绘制木材行业的现在——是一个棘手的过程。
The lumber industry* straddles the world of agriculture and manufacturing in complex and shifting ways. The value-add process from tree to lumber to pulp—or boards or aromatics or planks—adds up to a cool quarter of a trillion dollars of goods, and even that is before the real work begins that transforms the wood into furniture or veneer or cologne or house guts or charcoal. As you might guess, mapping the lumber industry’s future—hell, mapping the lumber industry’s present—is a snarly process.
因此，让我们关注明显的部分：
So let’s focus on the obvious bits:
每个人都使用一切。当然，集中程度不同，但每个人都将木材用于建筑、家具、燃料和纸张等。木材是人类赖以生存的基础材料，自有以来就有了。. . 人类。
Everyone uses everything. In different concentrations, of course, but everyone uses wood for construction and furniture and fuel and paper and so on. Wood is a base material for human existence, and it has been so long as there have been . . . humans.
但并不是每个人都能大量生产木材。美国作为一个拥有广阔中高海拔森林的温带大国，是迄今为止世界上最大的木材生产国，但由于它偏爱装满家具的大型单户住宅，它也是一个净进口国. 加拿大和墨西哥几乎满足了美国所有的盈余需求。忘记需要担心后全球化世界将给北美带来的变化；非洲大陆已经在为这个分部门照顾好自己的部门。
But not everyone can produce wood in volume. The United States, as a large temperate zone country with extensive forested mid- and high altitudes, is by far the world’s largest wood producer, but because of its penchant for large, single-family homes packed with furniture, it is also a net importer. Canada and Mexico fill nearly all of America’s surplus needs. Forget needing to worry about the changes a post-globalized world will bring to North America; the continent is already looking after its own for this subsector.
在去全球化的世界中，该行业存在三方面的问题：
In a deglobalized world, the industry’s problems are threefold:
首先，美国是更重要的全球贸易木制品的来源地，例如颗粒、锯末和刨花板等团块；面板如胶合板；和纸浆。在一个支离破碎的世界中，这种从大批量到低价值的产品不会航行那么远。对于美国皮埃蒙特的森林管理者和加工者来说，这将是一个问题，但在北美其他地区基本上不会引起注意。对于整个欧洲和亚洲的消费者来说，令人眼花缭乱的产品价格上涨几乎是理所当然的，尤其是因为几乎所有合理的产品替代品都是以石油为基础的。
First, the United States is the source for the more important of globally traded manufactured wood products, like agglomerates such as pellets, sawdust, and particleboard; panels like plywood; and pulp for paper. In a fractured world, such high-volume to low-value products just are not going to sail as far. That will be an issue for the forest managers and processors in the American Piedmont, but will largely pass unnoticed throughout the rest of North America. For consumers throughout Europe and Asia, dizzying product price inflation is pretty much a given, especially since nearly all reasonable product substitutes are petroleum based.
其次，不是来自美国的东西往往会越过我一直抱怨的那些地缘政治压力点：来自森林茂密的东南亚的木材流向东北亚，来自俄罗斯的木材流向中欧和西欧。即将到来的木材贸易中断的种类将随着产品组合的不同而变化。关于唯一可能——可能？——没问题的流程是斯堪的纳维亚木材流向欧洲其他地方。
Second, what doesn’t come from the United States tends to cross those geopolitical stress points I keep yammering on about: wood from heavily forested Southeast Asia goes to Northeast Asia, wood from Russia goes to Central and Western Europe. The variety of disruptions in the wood trade to come will be as varied as the product mixes. About the only flow that will maybe—probably?—be okay will be Scandinavian wood going elsewhere in Europe.
第三，环境问题迫在眉睫。2019 年，木材和各种木材副产品占欧洲发电量的 2.3% ，这主要是因为欧盟有一些非常愚蠢的规定，认为燃烧木材和木材副产品是碳中和的，尽管这是无可争议的事实木材燃烧排放的二氧化碳甚至比煤还多。
Third, there is a big looming environmental issue. In 2019, wood and various wood by-products accounted for 2.3 percent of Europe’s electricity generation, mostly because the EU has some epically stupid regulations that consider the burning of wood and wood by-products to be carbon-neutral despite the pretty much undisputed fact that wood burning emits more carbon dioxide than even coal.
更重要的是，大约一半被砍伐的树木被用作直接燃料，其中绝大多数在距离森林边缘一天步行范围内燃烧，特别是在印度和撒哈拉以南非洲。在后全球化的世界中，几乎不会禁止将木材用作燃料。如果有的话，相反的情况会发生。如果人们无法获得全球交易的能源产品，如天然气或柴油，他们将在没有热量做饭或保持温暖之间做出选择。. . 或燃烧木头。世界上一半的人口重新使用木材燃烧所造成的破坏规模——在碳排放、土地覆盖、生物多样性、烟雾、水质和安全方面——难以想象。
More to the point, some half of the trees felled are used as direct fuel, with the vast majority being burned within a day’s walk of the forest’s edge, particularly in India and sub-Saharan Africa. In a post-globalized world, very little about wood-as-fuel is going to be inhibited. If anything, the opposite will happen. If people cannot source globally traded energy products like natural gas or diesel, they will have a choice between not having heat for cooking or staying warm . . . or burning wood. The scale of the devastation—in terms of carbon emissions, land cover, biodiversity, smog, water quality, and safety—caused by half the world’s population reverting to wood burning is difficult to wrap the mind around.
接下来：随着 Asia Inc. 的倒闭，预计半导体世界将大不相同。
Next up: with the fall of Asia Inc., expect the world of semiconductors to look very different.
半导体的制造是一个极其困难、昂贵、严格且最重要的是集中的过程。从二氧化硅粉末的熔化，到将液态硅拉成晶体，再到将这些晶体切成晶圆，再到这些晶圆的蚀刻、掺杂和烘烤，再到将这些晶圆分解成单独的半导体比特，将这些极其精致的比特组装和包装成可以安装到 GameBoys、智能灯泡和笔记本电脑中的保护框架，通常都是在同一家工厂完成的。每个步骤都需要洁净室条件，因此与其通过清洁链运输多次运送产品，不如在同一个地方完成所有操作更安全、更可靠。
The fabrication of semiconductors is an exceedingly difficult, expensive, exacting, and—above all—concentrated process. Everything from the melting of the silicon dioxide powder, to the drawing of the liquid silicon into crystals, to the slicing of those crystals into wafers, to the etching, doping, and baking of those wafers, to the breaking of those wafers into individual semiconducting bits, to the assembling and packaging of those incredibly delicate bits into protective frames that can be slapped into GameBoys and smart lightbulbs and laptops, is typically all done at the same facility. Each step requires clean-room conditions, so rather than ship product multiple times via clean-chain transport, it is safer and more reliable to do it all in the same place.
台湾、日本和韩国做的半导体非常好。马来西亚和泰国负责中端市场。中国有讨价还价的基础。这些设施就是不动。
Taiwan, Japan, and Korea do the really good semiconductors. Malaysia and Thailand handle the midmarket. China has the bargain basement. These facilities just don’t move.
或者，至少，他们没有。但是世界在变化，现在他们在移动。由于对高技能工人的需求、坚如磐石的电力可靠性和大量大规模制造支持系统的限制，大多数晶圆厂别无选择，只能来到美国。
Or, at least, they haven’t. But the world is changing and now they are moving. Constrained as they are by the need for very highly skilled workers, rock-solid electricity reliability, and a host of at-scale manufacturing support systems, most fab facilities will have little choice but to come to the United States.
这就凸显了一个问题。美国制造业——尤其是在信息技术领域——具有极高的附加值。它可以而且确实参与了用于服务器、笔记本电脑和智能手机的高端芯片的大规模制造。如此之多，以至于即使在全球化空心化的高峰期，尽管按数量计算，美国只生产了约九分之一的芯片，但按价值计算，美国仍占所有芯片的大约一半。
This highlights a problem. American manufacturing—especially in the information technology space—is exceedingly high value-add. It can, and does, participate in the mass manufacture of high-end chips that are used in servers, laptops, and smartphones. So much so that even at the height of hollowed-out globalization, the United States remains responsible for roughly half of all chips by value despite producing only about one-ninth of chips by number.
不幸的是，制造业的未来仍将需要大量非天才芯片。美国工人只有在获得大量补贴的情况下才能降到那个水平。墨西哥也无济于事：它缺乏培养必要劳动力所需的大规模精准教育文化。如果目标是制造近几十年来才被数字化的东西，这是一个巨大的问题。你可以说“再见”物联网。*我们可能应该为模拟多于数字的一代汽车做好准备。
Unfortunately, the future of manufacturing will still need lots of non-genius-tevel chips. American workers can only stoop to that level with significant subsidization. Nor can Mexico help: it lacks the culture of large-scale precision education required to generate the necessary workforce. If the goal is to manufacture something that only became digitized in recent decades, this is a mammoth problem. You can say “goodbye” to the Internet of Things.* And we should probably prepare for a generation of vehicles that are more analog than digital.
当然，半导体不仅仅是半导体。芯片本身是没有用的。在安装到其他产品之前，必须将它们整合到线束和控制板等中。那个中间阶段需要眼睛和手指。这不仅让我想到了未来与墨西哥和哥伦比亚在中间制造步骤方面的合作伙伴关系，而且还表明在整个围绕半导体构建的行业中，特别是计算、智能手机和消费电子产品，大伙伴关系正在准备就绪。
Of course, there is more to semiconductors than just semiconductors. By themselves, chips are useless. They must be incorporated into wiring harnesses and control boards and whatnot before being installed into other products. That intermediate stage requires eyes and fingers. This not only makes me think about future partnerships with Mexico and Colombia for intermediate manufacturing steps, but also suggests grand partnerships are on deck throughout the industries built around semiconductors in general, specifically computing, smartphones, and consumer electronics.
计算机组装非常简单（事实上，大多数重要组件都是半导体），而且实际上只是价格问题。如果它是一种低质量的产品并且可以手工完成，比如组装主板，那么墨西哥就是它所在的地方。如果需要更高的精度——比如安装显示器——因此需要自动化，那就看看美国吧。
Computer assembly is surprisingly straightforward (most of the important components are, in fact, semiconductors) and it really just comes down to a question of price point. If it is a lower-quality product and can be done by hand, like, say, assembling motherboards, Mexico will be where it’s at. If more precision is required—say, the installation of displays—and so automation is required, look to America.
对于智能手机用户来说，后全球化的第一个十年将是艰难的。现在几乎整个供应链系统都在欧洲或亚洲。欧洲体系可能没问题。大多数欧洲电池制造商都在斯堪的纳维亚半岛，他们的区域供应系统不太可能面临太多挑战。但是亚洲系统呢？Phbbbt。韩国是最大的参与者，韩国的持续存在不仅是作为一个制造业或科技强国，而且作为一个功能性国家，都取决于韩国人与日本人实现和平。一个重大的错误步骤和整个 Android 操作系统将失去其大部分硬件。
The first post-globalization decade is going to be rough for smartphone users. Right now nearly the entire supply chain system is either in Europe or Asia. The European system is probably fine. Most European cell manufactures are in Scandinavia and their regional supply systems are unlikely to face too many challenges. But the Asian system? Phbbbt. Korea is the biggest player, and Korea’s ongoing existence not only as a manufacturing or tech power but as a functional country is dependent upon the Koreans making their peace with the Japanese. A significant wrong step and the entire Android operating system will lose most of its hardware.
至于 Apple 生态系统，Apple 在加利福尼亚设计其产品，然后将其生产完全外包给以中国为中心的网络，该网络肯定会在不久的将来崩溃。整个制造系统将需要在美国从头开始重建。东南亚国家缺乏所需的规模，而墨西哥则缺乏精度能力。即使在最好的情况下，一旦世界崩溃，我们将在 iPhone 机型之间花费数年时间。
As for the Apple ecosystem, Apple designs its products in California, but then entirely outsources its production to a China-centric network that is certain to implode in the not-too-distant future. That entire manufacturing system will need to be remade from scratch within the United States. Southeast Asian states lack the required scale, while Mexico lacks the precision capabilities. Even in the best-case scenario, once the world cracks we will go years between iPhone models.
电子产品——一个非常广泛的类别，包括从白色家电到传真机、路由器、搅拌机到吹风机的一切——有点像汽车，因为每个人都可以掌控一切。然而，与汽车不同的是，它没有太多秘诀。没有人会针对制造吊扇或车库门开启器所需的知识产权进行企业间谍活动或威胁开战。
Electronics—a very broad category that includes everything from white goods to fax machines to routers to blenders to hair dryers—are a bit like automotive in that everyone has their fingers in everything. Unlike automotive, however, there isn’t much of a secret sauce. No one carries out corporate espionage or threatens war over the IP required to make a ceiling fan or garage door opener.
定义电子空间的是订单时代制造业最重要的特征：劳动力分化。制作办公电话外壳的技能组合——最重要的是价格点——不同于连接电线或构建数字接口的技能组合。未来成功的电子产品制造商将是那些拥有多种劳动力技能和价格相近的制造商。看看东南亚和美墨边境地区。电子行业甚至比其他行业更重要交易。与汽车或计算机相比，电子产品是一个巨大的产品类别，并且是制造业中劳动密集度最高的部门之一。在国内制造半导体听起来很性感，但如果你想雇用几百万人，那你就得找电子产品了。
What defines the electronics space is that all-important feature of Order-era manufacturing: labor differentiation. The skill set—and above all, price point—that makes the casing for an office phone is different from the skill set that wires the cord or builds out the digital interface. The successful electronics manufacturers of the future will be the ones who have multiple labor skill sets and price points within close proximity. Look to both Southeast Asia and the U.S.-Mexican border region. Even more than the other sectors, electronics are a big deal. Far more than automotive or computers, electronics are a huge product category and are among the most labor intensive of the manufacturing sectors. It may sound sexy to build semiconductors domestically, but if you want to employ a couple million people, it’s electronics you’re after.
另一个重要的子行业是航空航天。与汽车一样，订单时代的三大制造地区各有自己的系统：北美的波音、欧洲的空中客车和中国的中国商飞。这不会持续。中国商飞尽管进行了数十年的强制技术转让和间谍活动，但事实证明无法制造功能性喷气式飞机所需的所有组件。订购后它根本没有能力导入它需要的东西，它就会死掉。
Another big-ticket subsector is aerospace. As with automotive, the big three Order-era manufacturing regions each has its own system: Boeing for North America, Airbus for Europe, and Comac for China. This won’t last. Comac, despite decades of forced tech transfers and espionage, has proven unable to build all the required components for a functional jet. Post-Order it simply won’t have the capacity to import what it needs and it will simply die.
空中客车也好不了多少。空中客车公司是一家由来自西班牙、法国、德国和. . . 英国，英国负责机翼和发动机等小事。在英国脱欧后的世界里，空中客车公司的未来已经不明朗。快进到悬而未决的美英贸易协议之后，英国航空航天将并入波音家族。更糟糕的是，空客飞机的一些最大买家是波斯湾阿提哈德航空、阿联酋航空和卡塔尔航空的长途航空公司。他们所有的航班都在波斯湾始发或终止。随着美国人放弃波斯湾地区，任其自生自灭，民用航空绝对不可能继续在该地区运营。如果空客有未来，它将重塑自己，成为不再依赖美国战略监督的欧洲的军事供应商。
Airbus isn’t much better. Airbus is a multistate conglomerate of aerospace firms from Spain, France, Germany, and . . . the United Kingdom, and the United Kingdom is responsible for little things like wings and engines. In a post-Brexit world, the future of Airbus was already sketchy. Fast-forward to the aftermath of the pending U.S.-British trade deal and British aerospace will be folded into the Boeing family. Even worse, some of the biggest purchasers of Airbus aircraft have been the Persian Gulf long-haul carriers of Etihad, Emirates, and Qatar Air. All their flights originate or terminate in the Persian Gulf. With the Americans abandoning the Persian Gulf region to its own fate, there is no way in hell that civilian aviation will continue to operate in the area. If Airbus has a future, it will be in reinventing itself as a military supplier for a Europe that can no longer rely upon American strategic overwatch.
之后，波音将接管全球航空业。全球航空市场将小得多，但作为最后一个站着的人还是有话要说的。
In the aftermath, Boeing will take over global aviation. The global aviation market will be much smaller, but there’s something to be said for being the last man standing.
机械是事情变得粗略的地方，而不仅仅是因为没有人真正将机械归入特定类别以进行数据收集。德国无疑是世界上最好的，因为德国文化对保持肛门精度的偏爱正是造就好的机器的原因。对世界来说不幸的是，文化无法转移。无论在上面挥霍多少现金。问问中国人就知道了，他们盗用德国设计和模仿德国产品的努力一直以失败告终。
Machinery is where things get sketchy, and not simply because no one really puts machinery into a specific category for data collection. Germany is hands-down the world’s best because the German cultural penchant for anal-retentive precision is precisely what makes for good machinery. Unfortunately for the world, culture cannot be transferred. No matter how much cash is splurged on it. Just ask the Chinese, whose efforts to pirate German designs and mimic German output have consistently met with failure.
这使我们得出三个结果。首先，美国会没事的。大多。虽然美国人在这方面不如德国人擅长，但休斯顿人相当接近。第二，中国的产业地位一塌糊涂。即使没有其他问题，中国人也完全依赖德国机器来维持整个工业巨头。第三，整个世界将经历技术放缓。如果德国人不顽强地挑战好机械的极限，那么预计该领域的技术进步——制造其他一切都需要它——会停滞不前。
This leads us to three outcomes. First, the United States will be okay. Mostly. While Americans aren’t as good at this sort of thing as Germans, Houstonians come reasonably close. Second, the Chinese industrial position is utterly screwed. Even if nothing else goes wrong, the Chinese are utterly dependent upon German machinery to maintain their entire industrial behemoth. Third, the world writ large will experience a technological slowdown. Without the Germans doggedly pushing the envelope for what good machinery looks like, expect technical advancement in the space—which is required to manufacture everything else—to stall.
那是高端。低端的全面重组也迫在眉睫。变化最大的两个子行业是纺织和布线。纺织业是低技术、劳动密集型行业，而布线是低技术、电力密集型行业。自工业时代伊始，这些行业一直是新兴工业化国家试图涉足的首选。
That’s the high end. A complete reorganization on the low end is imminent as well. The two subsectors that will see the biggest shifts are textiles and wiring. Textiles is a low-skilled, labor-intensive industry while wiring is low-skilled and electricity intensive. Since the dawn of the Industrial Age, these sectors have been go-tos for newly industrializing countries trying to get their foot in the door.
不再。
No more.
现在自动化的进步意味着大多数纱线、线、布和衣服都可以在发达国家通过机器制造，比在孟加拉国由半熟练的人手制造成本更低。预计由天然纤维制成的布料和服装将迁移到收获羊毛和棉花的地方：特别是美国南部、澳大利亚和新西兰。对于合成纤维，将很难超越美国墨西哥湾沿岸。请记住，与他们在 1980 年代和 90 年代离开时相比，这些“工作”在回归时看起来会大不相同。一个系统工程师可以独自维护一英亩大小的纺织设施。
Advances in automation now mean that most yarn, thread, cloth, and clothes can be made via machine in a developed country more cheaply than by semiskilled human hands in Bangladesh. Expect cloth and clothing made from natural fibers to relocate to where the wool and cotton are harvested: in particular, look to the American South, Australia, and New Zealand. For synthetic fibers, it will be difficult to top the U.S. Gulf Coast. Keep in mind that these “jobs” will look very different upon their return compared to their departure in the 1980s and 1990s. A single systems engineer can maintain an acre-sized textile facility all by his or her lonesome.
至于布线，美国页岩革命使美国获得了世界上最便宜的电力。不仅金属冶炼回到了美国，这个过程的下一步也是如此：布线。纺织业的收尾工作和后续制造的线束制造仍需要人工，但过去的门槛行业已经发生了不可逆转的变化。
As to wiring, the U.S. shale revolution has granted the United States the cheapest electricity in the world. Not only is metals smelting coming back to the United States, so too is the next step in the process: wiring. Human hands will still be needed for finishing work in textiles and the fabrication of wiring harnesses for follow-on manufacturing, but what used to be a foot-in-the-door industry has irrevocably changed.
这里的利害关系不仅仅是几只流浪袜子。纺织品、鞋类和电线通常是开发中最早的步骤之一过程。较贫穷的国家利用这些分部门不仅是为了获得收入和开始城市化，而且是为了积累某种组织和培训经验，以便在增值链中向上移动，进入更复杂的制造和系统。总体而言，这些分部门向更发达的经济体迁移，具体而言，它们的自动化程度不断提高，这使尚未开始发展进程的国家无法获得通常被证明是进程底层的机会。无论所讨论的国家是玻利维亚、老挝还是刚果，风险都不是转移到 1939 年之前的世界，而是转移到 1800 年之前的世界。
There’s more at stake here than just a few stray socks. Textiles and footwear and wiring are typically among the earliest steps in the development process. Poorer countries use these subsectors not simply to gain income and begin urbanization, but also to build the sort of organizational and training experience to move up the value-added chain into more sophisticated manufacturing and systems. The relocation of these subsectors to more advanced economies in general, and their increasing automation in specific, denies countries that have not yet begun the development process the opportunity to access what has typically proven to be the bottom rung of the process. Whether the country in question is Bolivia or Laos or Congo, the risk is not of devolving to a world that predates 1939, but to one that predates 1800.
分解故障
BREAKING DOWN THE BREAKDOWNS
如果有的话，本章低估了将在制造业世界产生反响和分裂的影响。任何提高运输边际成本的事情都会增加整个系统的摩擦。仅将一个附属部件的成本增加 1%，就会在很大程度上抹杀现有供应链的经济效益。如果运输成本仅增加100 %，大多数地点都会认为自己很幸运。
If anything, this chapter understates the impacts that will reverberate through and break apart the world of manufacturing. Anything that raises the marginal cost of transport increases friction throughout the system. Simply a 1 percent increase in the cost of a subsidiary part largely obliterates the economics of an existing supply chain. Most locations will count themselves fortunate if their transport costs increase by only one hundred percent.
这就是我们正在进入的世界。交通、金融、能源和获得工业投入的机会的变化将使其变得更加贫穷和更加支离破碎，并将使我们与现代联系在一起的许多进步退步。甚至这假设每个人都可以继续满足他们的需求，并以此作为现代国家生存下来。
This is the world we’re moving into. Changes in transport, finance, energy, and access to industrial inputs will make it poorer and more fractured, and will dial back much of the progress we’ve come to associate with the modern era. And even that assumes everyone can continue to source their needs, and in doing so survive as modern nations at all.
不幸的是，这还没有结束。现在我们必须讨论谁将会看到这个未来。现在我们必须讨论谁可以从事一项取代所有其他活动的活动：吃。
Unfortunately, that is not the end of the story. Now we have to discuss who will be around to see this future. Now we have to discuss who gets to engage in the one activity that supersedes all others: eating.
现在我们必须讨论农业。
Now we have to discuss agriculture.
利害攸关的是什么
What’s at Stake
这部分是迄今为止最重要的部分。如果你不能得到一个小部件，当然，你可能无法制造汽车。如果加油站没油了，你的生活肯定会一团糟。但是如果没有足够的食物，你就会死。你的邻居死了。你镇上的每个人都死了。你的国家死了。因粮食短缺而垮台的政府比战争、疾病或政治内斗加起来还要多。这几乎像是一个恶作剧，但食物是易腐烂的。一件我们绝对必须拥有的东西是一件可以在几个月内腐烂的东西，即使我们小心翼翼。如果我们不在的日子。食物稍纵即逝，而饥饿却是永恒的。
This section is the most important by far. If you can’t get a widget, sure, you might not be able to manufacture a car. If the gas station runs out of fuel, sure, your life is going to be thrown into a tailspin. But if there isn’t enough to eat, you die. Your neighbors die. Everyone in your town dies. Your country dies. Far more governments have fallen due to food failures than war or disease or political infighting combined. And it almost seems like a sick joke, but food is perishable. The one thing we absolutely must have is the one thing that can rot away in a matter of months, even if we are careful. Days if we are not. Food is fleeting, but hunger is forever.
如果说有什么不同的话，那就是长期的影响更大。如果食品供应系统因任何原因出现故障，您不能简单地制造更多。即使是速生燕麦，从种植到收获也需要三个月的时间。玉米需要六个。六个月通常也是一头猪最快被屠宰的时间。牛九个，虽然十二个更好——假设饲料很多而不是自由放养。想要有机和自由放养？你现在说的是二十四个月。最低限度。果园通常在前三年不生产。有些需要八个。
If anything, the long term is even more crushing. If the food supply system breaks down for any reason, you cannot simply manufacture more. Even quick-grow oats need three months from planting to harvest. Corn takes six. Six months is typically also the soonest a hog goes to slaughter. Nine for cattle, although twelve is better—and that assumes feed lots and not free-range. Want to go organic and free-range? You’re now talking twenty-four months. Minimum. Orchards typically don’t produce for the first three years. Some take eight.
也不是每个人都能玩。最难移动的散装产品之一是水。单个水分子的相对侧具有很强的负电荷和正电荷，这使得分子粘附在任何东西上，甚至彼此粘附。*抽水必须克服这种摩擦，而这只能通过不断消耗能量来实现。这是地球上大约一半的非冰冻地表不适合农业的最大原因，也是为什么近乎有意义的耕种我们耕种的土地中有一半首先需要工业时代的抽水技术。去工业化并不仅仅意味着工业的终结；这意味着大规模粮食生产的结束和大规模饥荒的回归。
Nor can everyone play. One of the most difficult-to-move bulk products is water. Opposite sides of individual water molecules have strong negative and positive electrical charges, which make the molecules cling to everything, even each other.* Pumped water must overcome this friction, and that can only be done by constantly expending energy. It is the single largest reason why some half of the Earth’s nonfrozen land surface is unsuitable for agriculture, and why meaningful cultivation of nearly half of the lands we do farm first required the pumping technologies of the Industrial Age. Deindustrialization doesn’t simply mean an end to industry; it means an end to large-scale food production and the return of large-scale famine.
如果有的话，我是在粉饰后全球化世界中食品生产面临的挑战。要了解未来到底有多么可怕，我们需要有一个最后的，一个真正残酷的章节。我们需要了解谁将有幸在我们无序的未来吃饭。
If anything, I’m sugarcoating the challenges facing food production in a post-globalized world. To understand just how dire the future truly is, we need to have one final, one truly brutal chapter. We need to understand who will be fortunate enough to be able to eat in our disorderly future.
我们需要回到起点，最后一次。
We need to go back the beginning, one last time.
建立赏金
BUILDING THE BOUNTY
很久以前，在遥远的地方* ，人类驯化了他们的第一种植物：小麦。有了这一项成就，其他一切都变得可能。陶器。金属。写作。家园。道路。电脑。光剑。一切。
Long ago, in a land far, far away,* humans domesticated their first plant: wheat. With that one achievement, everything else became possible. Pottery. Metals. Writing. Homes. Roads. Computers. Light sabers. Everything.
随着粮食作物的发展，小麦有点完美。它生长得相当快，无论生长季节长短，它都是主食。它很容易杂交以适应不同的海拔、温度和湿度水平。有些品种可以在秋季播种，春季收获，从而缓解饥饿季节。但最重要的是，小麦并不是特别挑剔。正如许多农民半开玩笑的那样，“小麦是一种杂草。” 霜冻迟或早，洪水或干旱：当天气不合作时，有时小麦是唯一生长的东西。因此，长期以来，小麦一直是大多数人的首选谷物。随着岁月流逝进入千年，几乎所有地方的每一种文化都大量种植小麦，其中大多数将小麦置于饮食体验的中心。
As food crops go, wheat is kind of perfect. It grows fairly quickly, making it a staple regardless of the growing season’s length. It is easily hybridized to adapt to different elevations, temperatures, and humidity levels. Some varieties can be planted in autumn and harvested in the spring, taking the edge off the starving season. But above all, wheat just isn’t particularly finicky. As many farmers half-joke, “wheat is a weed.” Frosts late or early, flood or drought: when the weather isn’t cooperative, sometimes wheat is the only thing that grows. As such, wheat has long been the grain of choice for most of humanity. As the years ticked by into millennia, nearly every culture, everywhere, grew wheat in significant volume, with most placing it at the center of the food experience.
小麦不仅仅是养活我们。它改变了我们。小麦的生物学特性塑造了我们物种的技术、地缘政治和经济结果。小麦通常不挑剔的态度不仅与气候有关；它也不需要保姆。一旦小麦种子被扔到地上，在收获季节之前你就大功告成了。如果小麦自给自足，那么农民一年中 90% 的时间都可以做其他事情。
Wheat did more than merely feed us. It changed us. Wheat’s biological characteristics shaped our species’ technological, geopolitical, and economic outcomes. Wheat’s generally unfussy attitude isn’t just about climate; it also doesn’t require babysitting. Once the wheat seeds are tossed on the ground, you are pretty much done until harvest time. And if the wheat tends to itself, then farmers can do other things for 90 percent of the year.
还有其他古老的谷物——法罗、小米、苋菜、画眉草——但它们都需要比小麦更多的土地、水或劳动力（通常三者兼而有之），才能产生更少的卡路里。这对当代饮食来说是件好事，因为我们都变得有点胖了，但对前工业化世界来说就不是这样了，那里饥饿是家门口的狼。对于非小麦文化，与吃小麦的群体接触往往是死亡之吻。小麦人有更多的身体可以投入冲突，这不仅仅是因为更多的卡路里意味着更多的人口，还因为他们可以在一年中的大部分时间里将长矛塞到农民手中。小麦可以获取更多、更可靠的卡路里，因为农民可以利用他们的“空闲时间”来种植更多的食物作物，导致更多的卡路里可以支持更多的人口。绵羊在中东特别受欢迎，而奶牛则是欧洲人的首选。*所有这些空闲时间意味着更大的劳动力分化，以及更快的技术进步。不吃小麦的人就是跟不上。
There were other ancient grains—farro, millet, amaranth, teff—but all required either more land or water or labor (or typically all three) than wheat—in order to generate fewer calories. That’s great for contemporary diets, whereby we are all getting a little pudgy, but less so for the preindustrial world, where starvation was the constant wolf at the door. For non-wheat-based cultures, contact with a group that ate wheat was often the kiss of death. The wheaties had more bodies that could be thrown into a conflict, not simply because more calories meant a bigger population, but also because they could press spears into farmers’ hands for a high proportion of the year. The wheaties had access to more and more reliable calories because farmers could use their “free time” to grow additional crops, leading to even more calories that could support even larger populations. Sheep were particularly popular in the Middle East, with cows being the go-to for Europeans.* All that free time meant greater labor differentiation and from that, faster technological progress. The non-wheat-eaters just couldn’t keep up.
如果说不受管理的小麦生产——只不过是将种子撒在地上——产生了地缘政治力量，那么有管理的小麦生产将以小麦为基础的文化提升到了令人眼花缭乱的高度。秘密在于经常被掩盖的灌溉概念。我们都知道植物需要水和阳光，但我们大多数人并没有将这种奇迹内在化，这种奇迹不仅可以来自水管理，还可以来自水控制。
If unmanaged wheat production—little more than tossing seeds on the ground—generated geopolitical power, managed wheat production elevated wheat-based cultures to dizzying heights. The secret is in the often-glossed-over concept of irrigation. We all understand that plants need water and sun, but most of us do not internalize the sort of miracles that can come from not simply water management, but water control.
我来自爱荷华州，那里经常下雨，土壤水分充足，灌溉几乎闻所未闻。爱荷华州的农业高产、稳健且规律。那里没什么太疯狂的。
I’m from Iowa, a place where it rains regularly, soil moisture is lush, and irrigation is almost unheard-of. Iowa agriculture is productive and robust and regular. Nothing too crazy there.
我最喜欢去的地方之一是华盛顿州的内陆，因为地形、人文和文化——好吧，好吧，我去喝红酒。华盛顿内陆的大部分地区都是干旱沙漠。年降雨量堪比奇瓦瓦沙漠。冬季气温很少会降至冰点以下，而夏季气温通常会超过 100 度。土壤水分非常低。
One of my favorite places to visit is the interior of Washington State because of topography and people and culture—okay, fine, I go for the wine. The bulk of interior Washington is arid-to-desert. Annual rainfall is comparable to the Chihuahuan Desert. Winter temperatures rarely dip below freezing, while summer temperatures often top 100 degrees. Soil moisture is hysterically low.
在工业化前的环境下，那里几乎无法生长。但是来自喀斯喀特山脉和落基山脉的径流形成了亚基马河、斯内克河和哥伦比亚河，所有这些河流都流经该地区并在该地区汇合。其结果是在西半球最干旱的地区之一的中心地带出现了一系列庞大而粗壮的绿化带。充足的阳光。几乎每天。灌溉来自北美最大流量的水系统。在谷歌地球上查看：连接亚基马、瓦拉瓦拉和摩西湖的粗略三角形要么是河谷平坦灌溉所带来的郁郁葱葱的绿色，要么是死褐色的沙漠。*
Under preindustrial circumstances, very little could grow there. But runoff from the Cascades and Rockies form the Yakima, Snake, and Columbia Rivers, all of which flow through and merge in the region. The result is a sprawling series of sinewy greenbelts in the heart of one of the Western Hemisphere’s driest regions. Full sun. Almost every day. Irrigation sourced from the largest-flow water system in North America. Check it out on Google Earth: the rough triangle connecting Yakima to Walla Walla to Moses Lake is either lush green from irrigation in the flats of the river valleys, or dead brown desert.*
爱荷华州最适合种植玉米和大豆——高湿度、单季、温带作物。在冬天降临之前，你会得到一个“标准”的六到八个月的生长季节。但在华盛顿，您几乎可以种植任何东西：玉米、大豆、坚果、苹果、梨、核果、小麦、土豆、葡萄、甜菜、啤酒花、薄荷，以及阳光下几乎所有的蔬菜。每英亩的生产力是疯狂的，因为所有农作物几乎每天都在接受烈日，同时也获得尽可能多的水。产品选择几乎是无限的，生产者几乎全年都可以种植。沙漠就是死亡。温带是季节性的。但是沙漠加上灌溉是kablam！
Iowa is optimized for corn and soy—high-humidity, single-season, temperate crops. You get a “standard” six-to-eight-month growing season before winter descends. But in Washington you can grow almost anything: corn, soy, nuts, apples, pears, stone fruits, wheat, potatoes, grapes, sugar beets, hops, mint, and pretty much any vegetable under the sun. Productivity per acre is insane because all crops get blazing sun nearly every day while also getting as much water as they could possibly want. Product options are nearly limitless, and producers can grow things nearly all year round. Desert is death. Temperate is seasonal. But desert plus irrigation is kablam!
古美索不达米亚、埃及、印度河流域的河谷都有足够的平地，不需要工业级的技术；工业化前的转移渠道起到了很好的作用。对于那个时代来说，这绝对是完美的成功地理学。所有前三个文明都将小麦的潜力与灌溉相结合，以产生世界上第一次大规模的粮食过剩，需要陶器来储存剩余的食物，需要道路来收集剩余的食物，需要文字和算术来记录剩余的食物，需要充满非农民的城市来吃剩余的食物。因此，美索不达米亚人扩张到安纳托利亚和扎格罗斯，埃及扩张到苏丹和黎凡特，印度河的人民从马希河扩张到阿姆河，再到波斯湾口。
Ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Indus River basin all had sufficient tracts of flat in their river valleys, so no industrial-level technologies were required; preindustrial diversion channels did the trick just fine. For the era it was absolutely the perfect Geography of Success. All of the First Three civilizations married the potential of wheat to irrigation to generate the world’s first large-scale food surpluses, necessitating pottery to store the surpluses, roads to collect the surpluses, writing and arithmetic to keep track of the food surpluses, and cities full of nonfarmers to eat the surpluses. And so the Mesopotamians expanded into Anatolia and the Zagros, Egypt into Sudan and the Levant, and the people of the Indus from the Mahi to the Oxus to the mouth of the Persian Gulf.
随着文明技术从前三国渗透到古代世界的广阔范围，受管理和不受管理的小麦生产的结合将许多殖民地变成了拥有自己剩余食物的子代文化，这反过来又催生了孙女文化。然而，在所有情况下，食物供应仍然是一个普遍的限制，对人口、城市化、技术进步和文化扩张设置了绝对上限。尽管小麦是一个心甘情愿的合作伙伴，但谷物仍然需要劳动力来播种和收割（以及管理灌溉系统的大量劳动力）。
As the technologies of civilization leaked out of the First Three into the broad reaches of the ancient world, the combination of managed and unmanaged wheat production turned many colonies into daughter cultures with their own food surpluses, which in turn spawned granddaughter cultures. In all cases, however, food availability remained a common restriction, placing an absolute cap on population, urbanization, technological progress, and cultural expansion. And while wheat was a willing partner, the grain still demanded labor for sowing and harvesting (and a whole lot of labor for managed irrigation systems).
事实证明，解决这一限制的方法看似简单：征服一个拥有大规模管理小麦生产的人，让他们的人为你不断壮大的帝国种植粮食。在大多数情况下，那个“人”是世界上拥有最佳管理小麦系统的土地，那里的大部分人口以种植小麦为奴：人类文明的创始者。
The solution to this constraint proved deceptively simple: conquer someone with large-scale managed wheat production and put their people to work growing food for your growing empire. In most cases, that “someone” was the world’s lands with the best-managed wheat systems, where the bulk of the population existed in wheat-growing slavery: the founding civilizations of humanity.
公元前六世纪，由居鲁士大帝领导的阿契美尼德帝国的波斯人征服了他们的美索不达米亚前辈，开始了美索不达米亚与波斯的对抗，这种对抗一直持续到今天。不久之后，居鲁士的后裔——冈比西斯和大流士——将埃及和印度河流域并入帝国。阿契美尼德扩张随后停止，原因很简单，所有值得拥有的粮食生产都已被征服。停滞不前的军事行动导致内讧，导致薛西斯的怜悯，*导致叛乱，导致马其顿人在公元前四世纪崛起亚历山大大帝，就像他之前的阿契美尼德王朝一样，征服了整个已知（美联储）世界。而且，就像他之前的阿契美尼德王朝一样，一旦前三国的大粮仓在他的控制之下，亚历山大就在很大程度上停止了。*
In the sixth century BCE, the Persians of the Achaemenid Empire, led by Cyrus the Great, conquered their Mesopotamian predecessors, initiating the Mesopotamian-Persian rivalry, which continues to the current day. Shortly after, Cyrus’s descendants—Cambyses and Darius—added Egypt and the Indus to the empire. The Achaemenid expansion then stopped for the simple reason that all the food production that was worth having had already been conquered. Stalled military campaigns led to infighting, which led to the tender mercies of Xerxes,* which led to rebellion, which led to the fourth-century BCE rise of the Macedonians under Alexander the Great, who, like the Achaemenids before him, conquered the entirety of the known (fed) world. And, like the Achaemenids before him, Alexander too largely stopped once the great granaries of the First Three were under his control.*
历史就这样展开了：在接下来的 2500 年里，帝国的崛起围绕着确保可以扩张的土地展开。罗马人的西班牙，俄罗斯人的乌克兰，德国人的波兰，英国人的南非，几乎每个人在某个时候的埃及。
And so history unfolded: the rise of empires for the next 2,500 years revolved around the securing of lands that could feed expansion. Spain for the Romans, Ukraine for the Russians, Poland for the Germans, South Africa for the British, Egypt for pretty much everyone at some point.
三个广泛的发展打破了小麦诱导的征服之轮。
Three broad developments broke the wheel of wheat-induced conquering.
首先，工业时代向人类介绍了合成农业投入品，最重要的是肥料，还有杀虫剂、除草剂和杀菌剂。已经用于农业的土地的产量在短期内翻了一番，但在整个历史上被遗弃的低标准土地可能会比工业化前的产量水平翻两番（或更多）。农田遍布地球。在新技术时代，成功的地理环境发生了变化。曾经休耕的土地变成了粮仓。凉爽、潮湿、日照少的德国北部突然成为几乎与法国北部相当的粮食生产国，而在西伯利亚种植农作物的能力使俄罗斯的生活稍微好一点。
First, the industrial era introduced humanity to synthetic agricultural inputs, most importantly fertilizers, but also pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides. Lands already used for agriculture doubled their output in short order, but subpar lands that had been passed over throughout history could experience quadrupling (or more) of their preindustrial output levels. Farm fields crept across the Earth. In the new technological era, the Geography of Success changed. Lands that had once lain fallow became breadbaskets. Cool, wet, low-sun northern Germany suddenly became a food producer nearly on par with northern France, while the ability to grow crops in Siberia made life in Russia a tiny bit less miserable.
帝国仍然征服了埃及* ，但随着工业技术的普及，许多文化现在可以在自己的领土内控制可靠的大规模粮食生产。曾经是帝国进军的地点迅速成熟，成为更老牌玩家的合法挑战者。老大国花了几十年时间才掌握了如此深刻改变的权力平衡。我们知道这个交战时代是 1800 年代的德国统一战争以及随后不久发生的更大的冲突。
Empires still conquered Egypt,* but with access to industrial technologies, many cultures could now control reliable, large-scale food production within their own territories. Locations that were once imperial marches quickly matured into legitimate challengers to the more established players. It took decades for the older powers to come to grips with such profoundly altered power balances. We know this come-to-grips era as the German unification wars of the 1800s and the far greater conflicts that followed soon after.
工业投入也不仅仅与肥料和杀菌剂有关。电力和钢铁也是工业化农业的技术。把它们放在一起，你就得到了液压系统，这使我们能够将水抽到山上或从含水层中抽水。我们可以通过海水淡化来制造淡水。工业化不仅仅增加我们每英亩的产量；它还使我们能够在以前贫瘠的土地上生产食品。
Nor are industrial inputs merely about fertilizers and fungicides. Electricity and steel are technologies of industrialized agriculture as well. Put them together and you get hydraulics, which enable us to pump water up hills or from aquifers. We can create fresh water via desalination. Industrialization doesn’t simply increase our output per acre; it also allows us to produce foodstuffs on previously barren lands.
制冷也是一种工业级农业技术，是一个不小的奇迹。肉类现在可以持续数周而不是数小时或数天。易腐性并没有像管理的那样被消除。像苹果这样易腐烂的东西，一旦经历了一些非常工业化的技巧，包括在接近冰点的温度、完全封闭的仓库中抽出所有氧气，就可以保存一年以上。当放置在阴凉、避光、密封、干燥的地方时，小麦可以保存长达八年。对于新鲜的东西，现代遗传学提高了耐久性，既能承受温度变化，又能延缓腐败。将这一切混合成地缘政治沙拉，其中涉及已经变得如此便宜的工业运输选择可靠，我们定期向世界任何地方运送任何东西。我们甚至运送干草。
Refrigeration too is an industrial-level agricultural technology that’s a not-so-minor miracle. Meats now last weeks instead of hours or days. Perishability hasn’t so much been banished, as managed. Something as perishable as an apple, once subjected to some very industrial-era tricks that involve a near-freezing-temperature, blacked-out warehouse that had all the oxygen pumped out, can last more than a year. When placed in cool, dark, sealed, desiccated storage, wheat can last up to eight years. For fresh stuff, modern genetics improves durability to both withstand temperature variations and delay spoilage. Mix this all into a geopolitical salad that involves industrial transport options that have become so cheap and so reliable, we regularly ship anything, anywhere in the world on a regular basis. We even ship hay.
打破小麦世界的第二个因素，令人震惊的是，秩序。通过确保所有人的海洋安全并禁止帝国扩张，美国人推翻了前几千年农业驱动的征服。前三国的土地都实现和/或巩固了脱离帝国统治的独立。随着进口技术和投入改变了其可能性的性质，世界各地曾经处于边缘的土地经历了爆炸式增长。这场“绿色革命”最终证明，我们今天所知道的发展中国家的农业产量几乎翻了两番。到目前为止，这一转变的最大赢家是南亚、东南亚和东亚国家，这些国家拥有全球一半的人口。订单，结合工业技术的传播，已经转移了 3十亿人从生活在剃刀边缘到粮食安全。更好的现代投入，更少的帝国时代限制，更多的农场面积更大，更多种类的产品产量更高。赢得四面八方。
The second factor that broke the world of wheat was, shocker, the Order. By making the seas safe for all and banning imperial expansions, the Americans overturned the previous millennia of agriculturally driven conquering. The lands of the First Three all achieved and/or consolidated their independence from their imperial masters. Once-marginal lands the world over experienced explosive growth as imported technologies and inputs transformed the natures of their possibles. This “Green Revolution” ultimately proved responsible for nearly quadrupling the agricultural bounty of what we know today as the developing world. By far the biggest winners of this shift were the countries of South, Southeast, and East Asia, home to half the global population. The Order, combined with the dissemination of industrial technologies, has shifted 3 billion people from living on the razor’s edge to being food-secure. Better modern inputs, fewer imperial-era restrictions, more farms on more acreage, larger yields of a greater variety of products. Wins all around.
更大的品种是结束小麦时代的第三个，也可以说是最重要的因素：人们选择干脆停止种植小麦。
That greater variety is the third and arguably the most important factor that ended the Wheat Age: people chose to simply stop growing wheat.
在长寿的帝王时代，控制小麦高产区就是成功的标准。可靠的粮食供应直接导致可靠的人口增长和可靠的军事扩张。但在工业化秩序时代，战略计算发生了根本性的变化。全球贸易软化了需要痴迷于小麦自给自足的必要性。美国的战略监督消除了需要为帝国进攻做准备的偏执狂。新投入与绿色革命相结合意味着全球小麦安全已经实现。因此，世界各地的农学家开始着手重新洗牌全球粮食生产的地理布局，特别注重专业化。
In the long-lived Imperial Age, control of the high-output wheat-producing zones was the very definition of success. Reliable food supply directly led to reliable population growth and reliable military expansion. But in the era of the industrialized Order, the strategic calculus changed radically. Global trade softened the imperative of needing to obsess about wheat self-sufficiency. American strategic overwatch removed the paranoia of needing to prepare for imperial assault. The new inputs combined with the Green Revolution meant global wheat security had been achieved. So agriculturalists the world over got down to the business of reshuffling the geography of global food production, with a particular focus on serious specialization.
玉米、大豆、扁豆或燕麦等高热量和蛋白质含量的产品像野草一样蔓延开来。世界上更好的牧场转向了畜牧业。灌溉土地——无论是在伊拉克还是在加利福尼亚州的中央谷地——开始以工业规模种植果园。
Higher calorie and protein-content products such as corn, soy, lentils, or oats spread like weeds. The world’s better rangeland shifted over to animal husbandry. Irrigated lands—whether in Iraq or California’s Central Valley—took up orcharding at industrial scales.
在工业技术较新的发展中国家，其结果是各种粮食生产的大规模扩张，小麦仍然是主要参与者。小麦更有可能种植在工业化前时期无用的土地上。
In the developing world, where the industrial technologies were new, the result was a massive expansion of food production of all types, with wheat still a central player. Wheat was simply more likely to be planted on land that in the preindustrial period had been useless.
在工业技术更加成熟的发达国家，小麦逐渐被推向边缘，而更多生产力的土地被用于其他一切。还有什么。
In the advanced world, where the industrial technologies were more established, wheat was steadily pushed to the margins while more productive lands were used for everything else. Anything else.
秩序对规模经济的鼓励意味着每一块土地和小气候都倾向于生产它最擅长的单一事物，这是由完全统一的全球市场的需求所推动的。玉米和大豆需要热量和湿度，因此它们位于大陆内部。一次霜冻就可以摧毁柑橘作物，将柑橘推向亚热带。大米不仅喜欢高温和潮湿；大多数版本需要在不同的生长阶段淹死——非常适合温暖潮湿的土地。燕麦和大麦喜欢更凉爽和干燥的天气，将它们转移到更高的纬度地区。所有谷物在收获前都需要一段干燥期才能成熟。通常，除了特定的小麦品种或甜菜之外，高纬度地区对任何东西来说都太冷了，*虽然热带地区不够凉爽或干燥，但大多数作物无法正常发芽和干燥——这鼓励采用完全不同的作物组合：从芒果到山药的一切作物。
The Order’s encouragement of economies of scale means every patch of land and microclimate tends to produce the single thing that it does best, as prompted by the needs of a fully unified global market. Corn and soy demand heat and humidity, placing them in continental interiors. A single frost can destroy a citrus crop, pushing citrus into the subtropics. Rice doesn’t just like heat and humidity; most versions need to be drowned at various stages of growth—perfect for warm, wet lands. Oats and barley like it cooler and drier, shifting them to higher latitudes. All grains need a dry period to ripen before harvest. As a rule, the upper latitudes are simply too cold for anything except specific wheat varieties or maybe beets,* while the tropics don’t get cool or dry enough for most crops to germinate and dry properly—encouraging the adoption of completely different crop sets: everything from mangos to yams.
饮食改变了。随着发展中国家人民获得国际贸易的机会，他们做了你可以预料的事情：国内农业产量提高，原材料开采比殖民地时更多，城市化，制造业多样化，赚更多的钱，吃越来越多更好的食物，这些食物越来越多地来自越来越远的地方。在东亚，这意味着从大米逐渐转向小麦，以及对猪肉的需求激增。在伊朗，这意味着更多的大米作为小麦的补充。在中国东北、加勒比海地区和撒哈拉以南非洲，这意味着高粱、小米和块根作物逐渐减少，而大米、鸡肉和牛肉逐渐增加。
Diets changed. As peoples of the developing world gained access to international trade, they did what you would expect: improved agricultural output at home, got a bigger cut of their raw materials extraction than they did as colonies, urbanized, diversified into manufacturing, earned more money, and ate more and better foods, which increasingly came from farther and farther away. In East Asia this has meant incremental shifts from rice to wheat, and a massive surge in demand for pork. In Iran it has meant more rice as a supplement to wheat. In northeast China, the Caribbean, and sub-Saharan Africa this has meant incrementally less sorghum and millet and root crops, and incrementally more rice, chicken, and beef.
有了基本的粮食安全保障，今天的“农业”不仅仅意味着主食，在很多情况下甚至不意味着食物。我们现在不仅生产玉米、小麦、大豆和大米，还生产土豆还有扁豆、苹果、樱桃、榛子、杏仁、鳄梨、草莓、蓝莓、藜麦、啤酒花、木材、棉花、亚麻、鲜花和大麻。每个地区都有自己喜欢的温度和湿度带以及土壤类型，订单使每个地区都能最大限度地发挥其优势，大规模生产，并销售给饥饿、富裕、不断增长的全球市场。小麦的大规模产品替代现在已成为常态。
With basic food security taken care of, “agriculture” today means much more than just staples, and in many cases doesn’t even mean food. We now not only produce corn and wheat and soy and rice, but also potatoes and lentils and apples and cherries and hazelnuts and almonds and avocados and strawberries and blueberries and quinoa and hops and timber and cotton and flax and flowers and cannabis. Each has its own preferred temperature and humidity zone and soil type, and the Order enabled each region to maximize its advantages, produce at scale, and sell to a hungry, wealthy, growing global market. Massive product displacements from wheat are now the norm.
考虑一下在地理、历史、气候、文化或经济结构方面几乎没有共同点的两个国家：新西兰和埃及。新西兰是一个非常潮湿的国家，而人口稠密的埃及有很多额外的劳动力来照料植物。在当代，两者都可以很容易地种植足够数量的小麦来满足他们的需要。事实上，如果他们选择这样做，他们将成为世界上最赚钱的小麦生产商之一。
Consider two countries with nearly nothing in common in regard to geography or history or climate or culture or economic structure: New Zealand and Egypt. New Zealand is a very wet country, while densely populated Egypt has lots of extra labor to tend to plants. In contemporary times both could easily grow sufficient volumes of wheat for their needs. In fact, if they chose to, they would be among the world’s most lucrative wheat producers.
都不玩那个游戏。
Neither plays that game.
相反，他们生产的产品更适合他们的环境和劳动条件——这些产品在全球范围内的需求量非常大。新西兰超温和的气候使其成为世界上最高效的乳制品、木材和水果生产国，奶牛围场、工业林和果园挤占了利润较低的麦田。同样，埃及种植棉花和柑橘供出口，而不是供当地消费的小麦。这两个国家都以高价出口农产品，然后进口更便宜的食品——比如小麦——如果全球农艺学将它们推向更自给自足的方向，它们本可以自己种植。
Instead, the pair produce products more customized to their environmental and labor conditions—products in ravenously high demand globally. New Zealand’s ultra-mild climate makes it the world’s most efficient dairy, timber, and fruit producer, with cow paddocks, industrial forests, and orchards crowding out less profitable wheat fields. Similarly, Egypt grows cotton and citrus for export rather that wheat for local consumption. Both countries export their ag products for top dollar, and then import cheaper foodstuffs—like wheat—that they could have grown themselves had global agronomics pushed them in a more autarkic direction.
这种小麦向外围地区的转移意味着世界上大部分小麦只种植在少数几个地方：美国大平原、加拿大草原省份、澳大利亚墨累-达令盆地加上非洲大陆的西南边缘、阿根廷中部的旱地、英格兰东南部，高度保护主义的法国无边无际的小田地，中国北部的饺子之乡，巴基斯坦和印度，以养活拥挤的群众并限制进口需求，以及广阔的俄罗斯小麦带，包括白俄罗斯，乌克兰, 和哈萨克斯坦。（其中，只有法国、巴基斯坦和印度在可以更有效地种植许多其他东西的领域，但对于这三个领域，效率并不是政府的目标。）
This banishing of wheat to the periphery means the bulk of the world’s wheat is grown in just a handful of places: the American Great Plains, the Canadian Prairie Provinces, Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin plus the continent’s southwestern fringes, the drylands of central Argentina, southeast England, the endless small fields of highly protectionist France, dumpling country in northern China, Pakistan and India to feed the teeming masses and limit the need for imports, and the great expanses of the Russian wheat belt, a zone that includes Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. (Of these, only France, Pakistan, and India grow wheat in areas that could grow lots of other things more efficiently, but for these three, efficiency isn’t what governments are targeting.)
自 1945 年以来，工业化秩序不仅使我们能够将总热量增加七倍；它使地球上的大片地区拥有大量人口，而以前仅靠地理因素无法支持它们。自 1950 年以来，北非的人口增长了5倍多，伊朗增长了 6 倍多，而沙特阿拉伯和也门的人口增长了10倍多。从一个大陆（或更远）以外的大陆出发的散装食品运输现在已成为一种普遍现象。
The industrialized Order hasn’t simply enabled us to increase the total calories grown by a factor of seven since 1945; it has enabled vast swaths of the planet to have large populations when geography alone wouldn’t previously support them. Populations in North Africa are up by over a factor of five since 1950, Iran over six, while Saudi Arabia and Yemen have increased by over a factor of ten. Bulk food shipments originating a continent (or more) away are now a commonality.
对于农业，工业技术改变了可能性的位置和数量，秩序改变了可能性的获取和范围，而大规模流离失所改变了可能性的内容和种类。耕种面积约 115 亿英亩，比人类历史上任何其他时期都要多。2020 年，农业总产值约为 8 万亿美元，生产的农作物比人类历史上任何时候都多。这大约是全球的 10%GDP，任何经济部门中最大的价值。这些食品（按价值计算超过三分之一）进行国际贸易的数量比人类历史上任何其他时期都多。甚至剩下的大部分都不会在当地消费（佛罗里达人可以吃多少佛罗里达橙子？）。
For agriculture, industrial technologies changed the where and how much of the possible, the Order changed the access and reach of the possible, while mass displacement changed the what and variety of the possible. More land, some 11.5 billion acres, is under cultivation than at any other time in human history. More crops—in 2020, total agricultural output was worth about $8 trillion—are in production than any time in human history. That’s roughly 10 percent of global GDP, the largest value of any economic sector. More of those foods, over one-third by value, are internationally traded than at any other time in human history. Even much of the remainder isn’t consumed locally (just how many Florida oranges can Floridians eat?).
如果目标是提高效率和提高生活水平，那么这一切都是有道理的。但全球贸易机制的转变并不需要太多，就能打破这个相互关联的系统。如果访问的地理范围缩小，那么“最有意义”的内容就会发生巨大变化。
If the goal is efficiency and rising standards of living, this all makes sense. But it doesn’t take much of a shift in the mechanics of global trade to shatter this interlinked system. If the geography of access shrinks, what makes the “most sense” changes drastically.
制造业、能源和金融都很酷。他们共同将全人类带入了现代。但是农业？这是从昔日的朦胧恐怖走向我们所了解的世界的第一步。如果当代农业停滞不前，这将意味着食品的数量和品种以及可用性和可靠性的大幅收缩。这将意味着曾经使用现代农业技术和市场摆脱前工业时代的整个国家现在将倒退到前工业时代。在工业化前的人口水平。
Manufacturing and energy and finance are cool and all. They have collectively brought the entirety of humanity into the modern age. But agriculture? It is the first step along the path from the misty terrors of yesteryear to the world we know. Should contemporary agriculture unwind, it will mean a massive contraction in volumes and varieties and availabilities and reliabilities of foodstuffs. It will mean that entire countries that have used modern agricultural technologies and markets to pull themselves out of the preindustrial age will now fall backward into the preindustrial past. At preindustrial population levels.
脆弱性的地缘政治
The Geopolitics of Vulnerability
到目前为止，让我们从农业的角度重新审视这个项目的其他一切。
Let’s reexamine everything else from this project so far, but from an agricultural point of view.
让我们从制造开始。
Let’s begin with manufacturing.
Order 对效率、规模经济和扩大工业技术范围的强调不仅决定了某些作物的种植地点，还决定了它们的种植方式。影响最大的是行栽作物，这些作物可以通过使用重型设备种植、施肥、除草和收割以工业方式种植。
The Order’s emphasis on efficiencies, economies of scale, and expanding the reach of industrial technologies shapes not simply where certain crops are grown, but how they are grown. Of largest consequence are the row crops, products that can be grown in an industrial manner via the use of heavy equipment to plant, fertilize, weed, and harvest them.
按产量计算，最大的行间作物是小麦、大豆、玉米、马铃薯、油菜、豆类、豌豆、荞麦、甜菜、亚麻、向日葵和红花。由于在斜坡或湿地附近操作重型设备会产生代价高昂的工业事故，因此此类设备与中耕作物的结合实际上只适用于平坦且广阔的农业区，这使得此类设备在整个加拿大、美国、巴西、阿根廷、澳大利亚、南非、荷兰、波兰、罗马尼亚、保加利亚、白俄罗斯、乌克兰和俄罗斯，并使其在英国、法国、德国、西班牙、比利时、阿尔及利亚、玻利维亚、墨西哥、中国和新西兰。这些国家的这些中耕作物总计约占全球粮食总产量的四分之一。更大的农场意味着更大、更专业的设备。专业化设备意味着专业化的制造供应链。专业供应链极易受到破坏。
The largest of the row crops by volume produced are wheat, soy, corn, potato, canola, beans, peas, buckwheat, sugar beets, flax, sunflower, and safflower. Because operating heavy equipment on slopes or near wetlands generates impressively expensive industrial accidents, the marriage of such equipment and row crops really only works in agricultural zones that are both flat and large, making such equipment absolutely critical throughout Canada, the United States, Brazil, Argentina, Australia, South Africa, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia, and making it regionally important within the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, Belgium, Algeria, Bolivia, Mexico, China, and New Zealand. Collectively these row crops in these countries account for about one-quarter of all global food production by mass. Larger farms mean larger, more specialized equipment. Specialized equipment means specialized manufacturing supply chains. And specialized supply chains are woefully vulnerable to disruption.
对于大规模中耕作物生产商来说，潜在的设备供应商名单非常少。
For mass row-crop producers, the list of would-be equipment suppliers is exceedingly short.
在全球化后期，只有四个地方生产批量和优质大规模中耕作物农业的相关设备。欧洲的制造能力是跨国的，并受制于欧盟的一致性（或缺乏一致性）。中国的设备偏小。中国小麦或玉米田的平均面积通常约为一英亩，不到美国同等面积的 1/350。北美的制造能力完好无损，但在计算组件方面严重依赖东亚。巴西人的生产能力有限，主要用于本国市场，但也有少量出口到南亚和撒哈拉以南非洲地区。
In the late globalization period there are but four places that produce the relevant equipment for mass row-crop agriculture in both bulk and quality. Europe’s manufacturing capacity is multinational and subject to the coherence (or lack thereof) of the European Union. China’s equipment is on the small side. The average size of a Chinese wheat or corn field is typically about one acre, less than 1/350 the size of its American equivalents. North America’s manufacturing capacity is intact but heavily relies on East Asia for computing components. The Brazilians have some limited production capacity, largely for their own market, but with a smattering of exports to South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.
在去全球化的世界中，欧洲供应链面临着严重的限制。德国制造的农场设备需要与德国汽车以及全球销售市场相同的整个中欧供应链联系。两者都不可能前进。法国的设备制造能力很可能会成功通过，因为它完全占领了国内市场，而且进入北美的通道也不太复杂。中国农机具的生产和出口，无论从生产还是出口的角度来看，都是一纸空文。期待巴西能够弥补一些空缺。
In a deglobalized world, European supply chains face severe constraints. German-made farm equipment requires the same supply chain linkages throughout Central Europe as German automotive, as well as global markets for sales. Neither is possible moving forward. French equipment manufacturing capacity is likely to pass through the needle successfully, due to both its total capture of its home market and less complicated access to North America. Chinese farm equipment production and exports are simply a dead letter, from both production and export angles. Look to Brazil to pick up some of the slack.
对于所有农业生产者来说，问题将是他们是否可以将自己与剩下的设备供应商之一联系起来。幸运的是，与制造中心脱节的大田行作物种植者的名单很短。如果地区地缘政治与阿尔及利亚、保加利亚、波兰、罗马尼亚、西班牙和英国决裂，那将是令人惊讶的，但如果它不与它们中的任何一个决裂，那就更令人惊讶了。澳大利亚、新西兰和南非距离他们的设备来源一点也不近，但他们也没有面临近乎严密的补给路线。
For all agricultural producers, the question will be whether they can tie themselves into one of the remaining equipment suppliers. Luckily, the list of big-field row-croppers disconnected from manufacturing centers is a short one. It would be surprising if the regional geopolitic breaks against Algeria and Bulgaria and Poland and Romania and Spain and the United Kingdom, but it would be more surprising if it breaks against none of them. Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa are not at all proximate to their equipment sources, but they also do not face supply routes nearly as gauntlety.
除了行作所需的大型凯迪拉克式巨型机器外，南亚和东南亚在较小的田地中使用较小的设备。由于中国作为供应商被排除在外，因此没有干净的替代品。印度确实生产很多小型工作卡车和拖拉机，但其供应链采购遍及全球（包括中国）。每个主要依靠内部供应链并制造合适尺寸装备的人——我想到的是巴西和意大利——都离得很远。大概泰国和马来西亚最好重组其部分汽车行业以填补迫在眉睫的差距。这不会——不可能——在一夜之间发生。
Outside of the big Cadillac-style mega machines necessary for row cropping, South and Southeast Asia use smaller equipment for their smaller fields. With China out of the mix as a supplier there is no clean substitute. India does make a lot of small work trucks and tractors, but its supply chain sourcing spans the globe (and includes China). Everyone who sports largely internal supply chains and makes appropriately sized kit—Brazil and Italy come to mind—is a looooong way away. Probably better for Thailand and Malaysia to retool some of their automotive sector to plug the looming gaps. That will not—that cannot—occur overnight.
俄罗斯、乌克兰、哈萨克斯坦和白俄罗斯等前苏联国家将感受到最严重的影响。当然，与大多数重型设备制造商一样，大多数都是在离家很近的地方制造的。但是，您所听过的关于俄罗斯拖拉机的每一个笑话都是事实而非虚构。俄罗斯失宠如此严重，以至于在后苏联时代很少有农民能够购买新设备。他们经营的是旧的. 尽管前苏联太空以制造低劣设备而闻名，但它更出名的是将外国零件塞进本地设备以保持其运行。更糟糕的是，前苏联最成功和最高产的农场都是大农场。. . 从其他地方进口他们的设备。不管是因为旧东西终于坏了，还是因为新东西得不到，世界这个角落的农业确实会变得绝望。痛苦不会一直被压抑。在订单后期，这些国家约占世界小麦出口量的 40%。
The worst of the impacts will be felt in the former Soviet states of Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus. Sure, as with most heavy equipment manufacture, most is made close to home. But every joke you’ve ever heard about Russian tractors is more fact than fiction. Russia’s fall from grace has been so hard that few farmers have ever been able to purchase new equipment in the post-Soviet era. What they operate is old. And as much as the former Soviet space is known for manufacturing subpar equipment, it is more known for shoehorning foreign parts into local gear to keep it running. Even worse, the most successful and productive farms in the FSU are the large ones . . . that import their equipment from elsewhere. Whether it is because the old stuff finally breaks down or the new stuff is unavailable, agriculture in this corner of the world is going to turn desperate indeed. The pain will not stay bottled up. In the late-Order period, these countries are the origin of some 40 percent of the world’s wheat exports.
一旦开始关注交通领域，情况就会变得相当暗淡。
The picture darkens considerably once one starts looking at the world of transport.
大多数农产品的散装性质需要巨大的散货船。大型农场设备的特殊性需要专门的运输系统（无法将大型联合收割机推入一个小巧的运输容器中）。骑士团对最大限度地生产专业产品的嗜好，加上当代农业生产的投入密集型性质，需要无穷无尽的商船队。虽然“只有”20-25% 的谷物和大豆通过国际运输，但大约 80% 的输入是通过国际运输的。
The bulk nature of most agricultural outputs necessitates giant bulk shipping vessels. The specialized nature of large farm equipment necessitates specialized shipping systems (there’s no shoving a massive combine into an itty-bitty shipping container). The Order’s penchant for maximized production of specialized products combined with the input-intensive nature of contemporary agricultural production requires endless merchant fleets. While “only” 20–25 percent of grains and soy are transported internationally, some 80 percent of the inputs are.
这些流动——所有这些流动——将在不同程度上受到威胁，其中任何一个的任何中断都会对供应系统上下产生毁灭性的连锁反应，实际上一直到餐桌。如果化油器延迟三个月到达装配地点，汽车仍然可以完成——只是延迟三个月。如果杀虫剂、化肥、柴油、生大豆或冷藏设备延迟三个月，大部分食品本身就会损失 沿着种植-生长-收获-加工-运输链条的某处。
These flows—all these flows—will be endangered to one degree or another, and any interruption in any of them will have devastating knock-on effects up and down the supply systems, indeed all the way to the dinner table. If a carburetor is delayed three months in getting to the assembly location, the car can still be finished—just with a delay of three months. If pesticide or fertilizer or diesel fuel or raw soy or a refrigeration unit is delayed three months, much of the food product itself will be lost somewhere along the chain of planting-growth-harvesting-processing-shipment.
行星地理有一个几乎不重要的问题。大约三分之二的人口生活在北半球的温带和近温带地区。这个半球是粮食净进口国. 唯一的好消息是，与北半球相比，南半球温带地区——对即将到来的地缘政治风暴具有高度抵抗力的地区——人口非常少。这使得全球南方国家成为大型食品出口国。但考虑到他们农业区的总面积还不到北半球的五分之一。. . 全球南方只能提供这么多帮助。北半球对粮食生产的任何直接破坏或间接对支持行业的破坏，都会立即变成人类前所未有的规模的粮食短缺。
There’s the hardly minor issue of planetary geography. Roughly two-thirds of the human population lives in the temperate and near-temperate zones of the Northern Hemisphere. This hemisphere is a net food importer. About the only good news is that the Southern Hemispheric temperate zones—regions highly resistant to the coming geopolitical storm—are very lightly populated compared to the Northern Hemisphere. That makes the countries of the global South big food exporters. But considering that the collective size of their agricultural regions is less than one-fifth that of the Northern Hemisphere . . . the global South can only help so much. Any Northern Hemispheric disruptions to either food production directly, or supporting industries indirectly, immediately turn into food shortages on a scale humanity has never before experienced.
所有这一切还有另一个层面：
There’s another level to all this:
在全球化秩序下，大多数国家专门生产各种非食品产品——例如，爱尔兰的轻工制造业、乌兹别克斯坦的棉花、阿尔及利亚的石油、日本的电子产品——然后利用出口销售来购买国际贸易食品。对于大多数国家来说，这些类型的互换将不再那么可用。击中这个系统的任何部分——石油或燃料的油轮、液化天然气油轮或天然气管道、半导体等高价值产品的喷气机、汽车的集装箱运输、钾肥、成品肥料或原粮的散装货船——它会迅速这不仅会波及前端的核心农业生产，还会波及食品进口商在后端支付这些进口产品的能力。
Under the globalized Order, most countries specialize in producing nonfood products of various sorts—for example, light manufacturing for Ireland, cotton for Uzbekistan, oil for Algeria, electronics for Japan—and then use export sales to purchase internationally traded foodstuffs. For most countries these sorts of swaps will no longer be nearly as available. Hit any part of this system—tankers for oil or fuel, LNG tankers or pipelines for natural gas, jets for high-value products like semiconductors, containerized shipping for automobiles, bulk cargo vessels for potash, finished fertilizer or raw grains—and it quickly ripples not simply to the core of agricultural production on the front end, but to the ability of food importers to pay for those imports on the back end.
在我们不断返回的相同地区和相同部门中，将感受到最大的痛苦：
The greatest pains will be felt in the same regions and in the same sectors we keep returning to:
- 来自东亚和北欧的制成品，
- Manufactured products out of East Asia and Northern Europe,
- 波斯湾、东亚和北欧的加工工业商品，
- Processed industrial commodities out of the Persian Gulf, East Asia, and Northern Europe,
- 北非、东北亚、波斯湾、南亚进口食品，
- Food products inbound to North Africa, Northeast Asia, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia,
- 波斯湾和红海、波罗的海、黑海、南中国海和东中国海的能源运输。
- Energy shipments on the Persian Gulf and the Red, Baltic, Black, South China, and East China Seas.
其中，最关键的是那些不仅转化为燃料，而且转化为使工业时代的其他一切成为可能的产品的投入。
Of these, the most critical are those for the inputs that translate not simply into fuels, but into the sorts of products that make everything else in the Industrial Age possible.
这给我们带来了能源中断。
This brings us to energy disruptions.
部分原因是显而易见的。石油和石油衍生产品对所有农业事物都至关重要。如果它们的数量不足，拖拉机、联合收割机、卡车、火车、码头和轮船这些对生产和运输食品及其输入流至关重要的设备就无法发挥作用。忘记电动汽车的热潮。撇开一些小细节不谈，即到了收获季节，农民每天要在田间工作 18 个小时（或更长时间），而且世界上没有任何电池系统可以仅用 6 个小时（或更少）来处理这种电量不足的情况) 充电时间，以及电动船无法在该死的海洋中充电的次要细节, 电气化技术尚不存在，可以满足重型设备或远程远洋运输的高功率尺寸要求。既没有现有技术也没有即将到来的技术革命可以取代农业领域的石油和天然气。
Part of this is painfully obvious. Oil and oil-derived products are critical to all things agricultural. If they aren’t present in sufficient volumes, the tractors, combines, trucks, trains, terminals, and ships that are central to producing and transporting foodstuffs and their input streams simply do not function. And forget the electric vehicle craze. Leaving aside the minor details that, come harvest time, farmers are out in the fields eighteen hours a day (or more) and that there is no battery system in the world that can handle that sort of out-charge with only six (or fewer) hours of in-charge, as well as the less minor detail that an EV ship could not recharge in the middle of the freakin’ ocean, electrification technology does not yet exist that can manage the high power-to-size requirements for either heavy equipment or long-range oceanic shipping. There simply is neither an existing technology nor an imminent technological revolution that can replace oil and natural gas in the agricultural sector.
星期四的回归怎么样？一项伟大的技术进步不仅给我们带来了现代，而且给我们带来了基本文明本身，就是能够通过水车和风车从流动的水和空气中获取能量，以便将谷物磨成面粉。我们现在用电磨管理上述研磨。在一个发电基本能源输入受限的世界里，祝你好运，不仅要保持工业生活方式，还要保持后水车时代的生活方式。一路回想第一章。世界上有多少不同的地理区域适合水车？你认为他们的数量足以为 80亿人磨面粉？？？
And how’s this for a Throwback Thursday? One of the great technological advances that brought us not simply the modern age but basic civilization itself was the ability to capture energy from moving water and air via watermills and windmills in order to grind grains into flour. We now manage said grinding with electric mills. In a world suffering circumscribed access to the basic energy inputs that generate electricity, good luck maintaining not simply an industrial lifestyle, but a post-waterwheel lifestyle. Think all the way back to the first chapter. How many of the world’s varied geographies have good geographies for waterwheels? You think there’s enough of them to grind flour for 8 billion people???
此外，不幸的是，能源问题不仅仅是“单纯”的燃料问题。为了解释这一点，我们需要跳到下一个对农业的限制：工业商品。
Also, unfortunately, the energy question is about a lot more than “merely” fuel. To explain that, we need to jump to the next restriction on agriculture: industrial commodities.
还记得石油和天然气不仅仅是简单地移动东西吗？石油通常是杀虫剂、除草剂和杀菌剂的主要成分，而大多数化肥的基础材料还包括天然气。发达国家在 1800 年代后期集体采用此类化学投入，使粮食产量增加了大约四倍，而发展中国家在二战后的几十年里，尤其是冷战后的几十年里，也参与了这种慷慨。如果没有这样的输入，情况就会相反。
Remember how there’s more to oil and natural gas than simply moving things around? Oil is typically the primary ingredient for pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides, while most fertilizers’ base materials also include natural gas. The collective adoption of such chemical inputs in the late 1800s in the advanced world increased grain output by roughly a factor of four, with the developing world participating in such bounty in the decades after World War II and especially after the Cold War. Without such inputs, the reverse will be true.
每种土壤类型——每种作物——不仅需要不同量的肥料，而且需要不同类型的肥料。每种肥料都有自己的地缘政治复杂性，导致令人眼花缭乱的混合影响。
Every soil type—every crop—demands not only different amounts of fertilizer, but different types as well. Each fertilizer has its own grab bag of geopolitical complications, resulting in a dizzying mix of implications.
天然气几乎是氮肥生产所有方面的核心。如果目标是多叶生长，氮是首选营养素，这使得氮肥对于玉米和小麦等草以及水果和蔬菜（花是专门的“叶子”）来说都是关键。任何无法为国内炼油采购原油的人都无法生产氮肥。
Natural gas is central to nearly all aspects of the fabrication of nitrogen-type fertilizers. Nitrogen is the go-to nutrient if the goal is leafy growth, making nitrogen-type fertilizers key both for grasses such as corn and wheat as well as fruits and vegetables (flowers are specialized “leaves”). Anyone who cannot source crude for domestic refining cannot produce nitrogen fertilizers.
这将成为东半球几乎所有地方的问题，但与更广泛的能源问题一样，韩国、中欧和大部分撒哈拉以南非洲地区的复杂性将尤为严重。农业产量下降幅度最大的国家肯定是中国。中国不仅几乎什么都能大规模种植，而且中国的土壤和水质也很差，以致于中国农民每生产一卡路里所用的肥料通常比其他任何国家都多——就氮肥而言，是全球平均水平的五倍。
This will be a problem nearly everywhere in the Eastern Hemisphere, but as with the broader energy question, the complications will be particularly intense in Korea, Central Europe, and the bulk of sub-Saharan Africa. The country that will certainly face the biggest declines in agriculture output will be China. Not only do the Chinese grow pretty much everything at scale, but Chinese soil and water quality is so low that Chinese farmers generally use more fertilizer per calorie produced than any other country—five times the global average in the case of nitrogen fertilizers.
对作物比地点更感兴趣？考虑到整个产品清单的前五名生产商中至少有两家将面临长期氮肥短缺：
More interested in crops than locations? Consider that at least two of the top five producers of this entire list of products will face chronic nitrogen fertilizer shortages:
杏仁、苹果、豆类、蓝莓、西兰花、卷心菜、胡萝卜、腰果、木薯、花椰菜、樱桃、椰子、玉米、黄瓜、醋栗、茄子、无花果、福尼奥果、葡萄、青豆、奇异果、生菜、小米、燕麦、秋葵、橄榄、洋葱、桃子、豌豆、菠萝、李子、土豆、豆类、榅桲、藜麦、覆盆子、大米、黑麦、芝麻、南瓜、草莓、红薯、萝卜、小麦和山药。
Almonds, apples, beans, blueberries, broccoli, cabbage, carrots, cashews, cassava, cauliflower, cherries, coconuts, corn, cucumbers, currants, eggplant, figs, fonio, grapes, green beans, kiwifruit, lettuce, millet, oats, okra, olives, onions, peaches, peas, pineapples, plums, potatoes, pulses, quince, quinoa, raspberries, rice, rye, sesame, squashes, strawberries, sweet potatoes, turnips, wheat, and yams.
不幸的是，这——所有这一切——只是这个特殊地狱景观的序幕。
This—all this—is unfortunately just the opener for this particular hellscape.
除了简单的石油或天然气，化肥还有很多其他用途。根据称为磷酸盐的材料，还有第二种肥料分类。磷酸盐本质上是化石化的鸟粪，可作为 . 的合适替代品。. . 人类的便便。我在这里稍微过于简单化了，但是开采的鸟粪经过酸处理，磨成粉末，然后撒在植物上。事实证明，它的商品化和工业化生产对工业化农业的兴起绝对至关重要，尤其是因为 a) 现在需要食物的人比 1945 年多得多，并且 b) 大多数人都同意储存和传播我们的食物自己的大便是我们真的不想做的事情。证明这些事实？自 1960 年以来，磷肥的生产和应用量增长了八倍。
There is a lot more to fertilizer than simply oil or natural gas. There’s a second classification of fertilizer based on a material called phosphate. Phosphate is, in essence, fossilized bird poop, which serves as a suitable substitute to . . . human poop. I’m slightly oversimplifying here, but the mined bird poop is treated with acid, ground to a powder, and tossed on plants. Its commodification and production in industrial volumes has proven absolutely critical to the rise of industrialized agriculture, especially because a) there are a lot more people who need food now than there were in 1945, and b) most of humanity agrees that storing and spreading our own poop is something we would really rather not do. Testament to these facts? Phosphate-based fertilizers experienced an eightfold increase in production and application since 1960.
不管你对人口话题有何看法，*世界上最大的磷酸盐供应国是美国、俄罗斯、中国和摩洛哥。希望现在你知道我认为美国（囤积供区域使用）和俄罗斯（对曾经从梦想破灭的帝国出现的任何东西说“再见”）的供应将会发生什么。中国的产品来自其西部内陆省份，这些省份在大多数情况下都是分裂国家，因此要保持中国产品的国际化，中国需要穿的不是一根针，而是三根针。
Regardless of your feelings on the topics of population,* the world’s biggest phosphate suppliers are the United States, Russia, China, and Morocco. Hopefully by now you know what I think is going to happen to supplies out of America (hoarded for regional use) and Russia (say “goodbye” to anything that once emerged from the empire of broken dreams). China’s production comes from its deep inland western provinces, which are in most cases secessionist, so keeping Chinese production internationalized requires China threading not one needle, but instead three.
这让摩洛哥成为世界的伟大希望，而且这一次真的有希望了。除了其已经生产的磷酸盐资产外，摩洛哥还占据了一块名为西撒哈拉的领土，该地区拥有世界上最大的未开发磷酸盐供应，其中大部分位于在离海岸几英里的地方。*即使俄罗斯和中国的供应完全从市场上消失，美国加上扩大后的摩洛哥也应该能够为北美、南美、欧洲和非洲的所有地区供应足够的数量。这对他们来说很好。和 。. . 对其他人来说都是不幸的。
That leaves Morocco as the world’s great hope, and for once there is actual hope. In addition to its already-productive phosphate assets, Morocco occupies a territory called the Western Sahara, which has the world’s largest undeveloped phosphate supplies, most of which are located within a few miles of the coast.* Even should Russian and Chinese supplies fall off the market completely, the United States plus an enlarged Morocco should be able to supply sufficient volumes for all of North America, South America, Europe, and Africa. That’s great for them. And . . . wretched for everyone else.
这实际上比听起来更糟。高度专业化的全球化农业世界为自己创造的众多复杂情况之一是，我们现在在整体系统中种植或饲养每一种植物或动物时，它在经济上最有意义。例如，牛已转移到大平原，而玉米和大豆则在中西部占据主导地位。在订购前的日子里，两者或多或少会在同一地点。在该预购系统中，农民将使用牛粪为他们的田地提供磷。由于没有直接的近距离动物粪便供应，农民现在别无选择，只能使用人造磷酸盐类肥料。这需要国际供应链采购和加工磷酸盐，并需要汽油和柴油将肥料运到田间。
This is actually worse than it sounds. One of the many complications the world of hyperspecialized globalized agriculture has created for itself is that we now grow or raise each plant or animal where it makes the most economic sense within a holistic system. For example, cattle have shifted into the Great Plains, while corn and soy dominate the Midwest. In the pre-Order days, the two would have been more or less colocated. In that pre-Order system, the farmers would use cattle manure to provide phosphorus for their fields. Without immediate proximate supplies of animal poop, farmers now have no choice but to use artificial, phosphate-type fertilizers. That has required both international supply chains to source and process the phosphates, and gasoline and diesel to get the fertilizer to the field. This entire model collapses in a post-globalized system.
但与氮肥和磷肥一样重要的是，它们无法与钾肥相提并论。在结果方面，大多数植物在收获时的钾含量按重量计在 0.5% 到 2.0% 之间，其中钾含量最高的部分是供应给人类供应链的部分。每种作物每年都需要大量的钾。在采购方面，世界上几乎所有的钾都来自一种被称为钾盐的矿物，而国际贸易的钾盐仅来自六个地方：约旦、以色列、德国、俄罗斯、白俄罗斯和加拿大。即使拥有无限的美国安全和经济支持以及事实上的以色列管理，约旦仍是一个濒临失败的国家。在后美国时代中东，以色列将有很多东西，但“贸易中心”不会是其中之一。德国的供应不足以帮助德国边界以外的任何国家。俄罗斯和白俄罗斯已经站在新铁幕的另一边。那就是离开加拿大。为加拿大感谢上帝！南美洲和澳大利亚——相对于其人口而言生产和出口最多食品的大陆——几乎没有钾肥。中国进口了一半的需求。南亚、欧洲和撒哈拉以南非洲极度缺乏钾肥和磷酸盐。
But as critical as nitrogen and phosphate fertilizers are, they cannot hold a candle to potassium fertilizers. On the outcome side, most plants at harvest are between 0.5 percent and 2.0 percent potassium by weight, with the most potassium-heavy bits being the parts that feed into the human supply chain. Every crop needs a lot of potassium every year. On the sourcing side, nearly all the world’s potassium comes from a mineral known as potash, and internationally traded potash comes from just six places: Jordan, Israel, Germany, Russia, Belarus, and Canada. Jordan is a borderline failed state even with unlimited American security and economic support and de facto Israeli management. In a post-American Middle East, Israel will be many things, but a “trade hub” will not be one of them. German supplies are insufficient to help out any country beyond those which Germany borders. Russia and Belarus are already on the other side of a new Iron Curtain. That just leaves Canada. Thank God for Canada! South America and Australia—the continents that produce and export the greatest volumes of foodstuffs relative to their populations—have almost no potash. China imports half its needs. South Asia, Europe, and sub-Saharan Africa are painfully shy of both potash and phosphates.
对即将到来的全球化肥——以及由此引发的粮食短缺——有一线希望：大多数农业科学家的大多数研究表明，大多数农民几十年来一直在过度施肥，尤其是在钾肥方面。这表明目前大多数地方的大多数农场的土壤中都有过剩的钾。这进一步表明，大多数农民可以减少肥料投入，而不会牺牲那么多产量。问题是，持续多长时间？大多数数据表明长达十年。这似乎还不够。它不是。这远远不够。但这确实表明，也许我们将有一些时间来寻求解决方案，而不是在有人第一次劫持货船时直接跳入大陆规模的饥荒。
There is one itty-bitty ray of hope in the coming global fertilizer—and from that, food—shortage: most studies by most agricultural scientists suggest that most farmers have been overfertilizing for decades, especially when it comes to potassium fertilizers. This would suggest that at present most farms in most places have a potassium surplus baked into the soil. This would further suggest that most farmers can reduce their inputs of fertilizer without sacrificing yields by all that much. The question is, for how long? Most data suggest up to a decade. That might seem insufficient. It is not. It is wildly insufficient. But it does suggest that perhaps we will have a bit of time to scramble for solutions rather than jumping directly into continental-sized famines the first time someone hijacks a cargo ship.
让我们以农业与金融之间的相互作用来结束这场愉快的讨论。这听起来似乎很明显，但农学家往往要等到他们才为他们的产品获得报酬。. . 交付它。这听起来可能更明显，但农学家无法通过双班制或奇数时间或相反的季节来生产更多的产品。在季节性天气允许的情况下种植或出生东西。在不同季节的天气允许的情况下种植或饲养东西。东西一旦成熟就会被收获或屠宰，几乎可以肯定是在另一个季节。只有这样，农民才能得到报酬。
Let’s end this cheery discussion with a look at the interaction between agriculture and finance. This might sound obvious, but agriculturalists tend to not get paid for their product until they . . . deliver it. This might sound even more obvious, but agriculturalists cannot work double shifts or odd hours or opposite seasons to generate more product. Stuff is planted or born when seasonal weather allows it. Stuff is grown or raised while the weather of a different season enables it. Stuff is harvested or slaughtered once it reaches maturity, almost certainly in yet another season. And only then are agriculturalists paid.
但与前工业时代相比，我们已经走过了漫长的道路，当时农业的唯一投入是几袋从上次收获中保留下来的未碾磨的小麦，或者当饲养动物的唯一成本是一个容易分心、观星的牧羊人男生。当代工业化农业有令人眼花缭乱的投入。它们分为三大类。
But we’ve come a long way from preindustrial days, when the only inputs for farming were a few bags of unmilled wheat that had been held back from the last harvest, or when the only cost for raising animals was an easily distracted, stargazing shepherd boy. Contemporary industrialized agriculture has a dizzying array of inputs. They fall into three general categories.
生料. 种植种子听起来很简单，但在许多情况下，杂交、转基因或其他特殊种子比仅仅阻止前一年的收成要昂贵得多。这种专门化的种子很容易带来三倍于传统种植方式的收成。2021 年，种植一英亩玉米的种子成本约为 111 美元。需要购买果园的树种。为了生产更大、更高产和更美味的肉类产品，选择育种的永无止境的过程需要永无止境的努力来确保完美的种马。在 2019 年 COVID 之前的低通货膨胀时期，一只普通的种羊很容易让牧场主少花 600 美元，而一头普通的角质公牛则要 1,500 美元。在撰写本文时，在一切都短缺的经济中，这些数字翻了一番。
Raw stock. Seeds for planting sounds simple, but in many cases hybridized, genetically modified, or otherwise specialized seeds are far more expensive than simply holding back some of the previous year’s harvest. Such specialized seeds easily lead to harvests triple of what could be grown the old-fashioned way. In 2021, seeds for a single acre of corn plantings ran about $111. Tree stock for orchards needs to be purchased. The never-ending process of selective breeding to generate bigger, more productive, and tastier meat products requires a never-ending effort to secure the perfect stud. In the pre-COVID low-inflation days of 2019, a basic stud sheep easily set back a rancher $600, while a run-of-the-mill horny bull went for $1,500. In the everything-shortage economy at the time of this writing, those numbers have doubled. Should you want something special, top-notch Black Angus breeding stock can easily set you back seven grand at auction.
增长投入。这些包括肥料、除草剂、杀虫剂、杀菌剂，可能还有用于植物作物的灌溉，以及用于畜牧业的青贮饲料、放牧权和医疗投入。这些费用不是一次性的。无论您从事的是种植业还是畜牧业，除了小麦，几乎所有作物都需要一定程度的关注和投入——整个季节。
Growth inputs. These include fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, and possibly irrigation for plant crops, and silage, grazing rights, and medical inputs for animal husbandry. Such expenses are not once-and-done. Whether you are engaged in plant or animal husbandry, pretty much everything but wheat requires a degree of attention—and inputs—all season long.
设备。一台现代化的联合收割机将使农民损失 50 万美元。奶牛不仅必须不受天气影响，而且还需要能够每天多次挤奶的设施。大多数较新的、低劳动力的、主要是自动化的设施的安装成本都超过 1000 万美元。随着全球人口老龄化和劳动力成本的上升，果园甚至投资于节省劳动力的机器，这些机器可以喷洒树木、自动化灌溉任务以及采摘、分离、清洁甚至包装水果。
Equipment. A modern combine will set a farmer back a cool half million. Dairy cows not only must be shielded from the weather, but they require facilities capable of milking them multiple times a day. Most of the newer, low-labor, mostly automated facilities have installation costs in excess of $10 million. As global demographics age and labor costs rise, orcharders have even invested in labor-saving machines that spray trees, automate irrigation tasks, and pick, separate, clean, and even pack fruits.
所有这些都在燃料和劳动力等更多基准成本之外。
All of this is in addition to more baseline costs such as fuel and labor.
明尼苏达州一个典型的 200 英亩玉米农场每年的投入支出约为 85,000 美元。典型的 5,500 英亩家族企业小麦蒙大拿州的农场预计每年的数字将超过 100 万美元。除非一切都得到资助，否则这一切都是不可能的。破坏金融，整个系统就会崩溃。
A typical 200-acre corn farm in Minnesota can expect input outlays of about $85,000 every year. A typical 5,500-acre family corporation wheat farm in Montana can expect that annual figure to top $1 million. None of that would be possible unless everything was financed. Disrupt that finance and the entire system collapses.
在发达经济体中，农业系统的金融化通常直接整合到治理系统中，以平滑过程并保护农民和牧场主免受金融、经济和气候周期的粗俗影响。例如，支持美国农业生产者的农场信贷系统享有直接的国会特许权，是美国最大的金融机构之一。
Among the advanced economies, the financialization of the agricultural system is often integrated directly into governing systems in order to smooth out the process and protect farmers and ranchers from the vulgarities of cycles financial, economic, and climatic. For example, the Farm Credit System, which supports American agricultural producers, enjoys a direct congressional charter and is one of the United States’ largest financial institutions.
大多数国家缺乏那种组织和财政实力，并且更容易受到全球金融可用性的突发奇想和趋势的影响。从 1990 年到 2020 年，这不是什么大问题。前苏联世界的资本外逃、中国的超金融化、欧洲和日本的大量农业补贴，再加上婴儿潮一代提供的可笑的廉价信贷，已经让世界各地的农民获得了他们所能获得的所有融资。胃。但在去全球化和全球人口反转，那个环境正在从里到外。即使借贷条件收紧和流动性消失，借贷成本也会上升。农业生产者将与其他所有人一起受苦，但当农业生产者无法获得融资时，就会出现粮食短缺。*
Most countries lack that sort of organizational and financial heft, and are far more subject to the whims and trends of global financial availability. From 1990 through 2020, that wasn’t much of a problem. Capital flight from the former Soviet world, hyperfinancialization out of China, and heavy agricultural subsidies out of Europe and Japan, combined with the ridiculously available and cheap credit made possible by the Boomer Bulge, has deluged agriculturalists the world over with all the financing they could stomach. But between deglobalization and the global demographic inversion, that environment is turning inside out. Borrowing costs will rise even as borrowing terms tighten and liquidity vanishes. Agricultural producers will suffer right along with everyone else, but when agricultural producers cannot source financing, there are food shortages.*
简而言之，几乎所有部门的中断都会立即转化为农业生产的中断，带来灾难性的后果。
Simply put, disruption in nearly any sector immediately translates into a disruption of agricultural production with catastrophic outcomes.
避免或接受最坏的情况
Avoiding—or Accepting—the Worst
让我们做一些排序。
Let’s do some rank ordering.
第一类食品出口国是那些从金融到化肥再到燃料的所有供应系统都充分自建的国家，它们只需稍作调整就可以继续生产当前的产品组合。法国、美国和加拿大是地球上唯一勾选所有方框的国家。俄罗斯有惊无险。俄罗斯的农用车辆是俄罗斯的。由于人口老龄化和崩溃，俄罗斯根本没有劳动力来维持农业产出，除非俄罗斯无法自行制造那种庞大的现场设备。
The first category of food-exporting countries are those whose supply systems for everything from finance to fertilizers to fuels are sufficiently in-house that they can continue producing their current product set with only minor adjustments. France, the United States, and Canada are the only countries on the planet that check all the boxes. Russia is a near miss. Russian farm vehicles are, well, Russian. Saddled with an aging and collapsing population, Russia simply doesn’t have the labor to maintain ag output with anything less than the sort of mammoth field equipment that Russia is incapable of manufacturing for itself.
接下来是那些在区域中拥有大部分部件的出口国。他们仍然需要访问某种朋友和家人网络，以满足他们所有的输入需求，但即使在混乱的世界中，这也应该是可管理的。
Next up are those exporting countries that have most of the pieces in place regionally. They will still require access to a sort of friends-and-family network in order to meet all their input needs, but even in a Disorderly world this should be manageable.
从面临挑战最少到最大的国家排名：新西兰、瑞典、阿根廷、澳大利亚、土耳其、尼日利亚、印度、乌拉圭、巴拉圭、泰国、越南、缅甸、意大利和西班牙。所有这些都有缺点——最明显的是在获取设备、肥料和能源方面——但没有一个可能面临那种会破坏更脆弱地区生产的极端供应或安全挑战。
Ranked from those facing the least to greatest challenges: New Zealand, Sweden, Argentina, Australia, Turkey, Nigeria, India, Uruguay, Paraguay, Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar, Italy, and Spain. All have shortcomings—most notably in accessing equipment, fertilizers, and energy—but none are likely to face the sort of extreme supply or security challenges that will wreck production in more vulnerable locations.
白俄罗斯、哈萨克斯坦和乌克兰也属于这一类。除了投入短缺之外，还有一个悬而未决的问题是，随着俄罗斯重申对它们的更大控制，任何多余的粮食产量是否可以出口到任何有用的地方。请记住，俄罗斯在其边缘地区种植了大量小麦。在订单高峰期的歉收年份，俄罗斯已经干扰了其他国家的出口三个小麦带州，以保证本国人民充足的粮食供应。
Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine are in this category as well. In addition to input shortages, there’s an open question whether any excess food output can be exported anywhere useful as Russia reasserts greater control over them. Keep in mind that Russia grows a lot of wheat on its marginal territories. In poor harvest years at the height of the Order, Russia already interfered with exports out of the other three wheat-belt states in order to ensure its own people sufficient food supplies.
第三类是那些出口商，如果没有一个完美的不太可能的地缘政治因素的集合，这些因素在很大程度上超出了他们的塑造能力，他们根本无法维持维持事物发展所需的输入流。他们不会面临灾难性的产量下降，但他们必须习惯农业与地缘政治威胁交织在一起——在某些年份，这意味着农作物根本无法发挥作用。这就是巴西、克罗地亚、丹麦、芬兰、荷兰、巴基斯坦和南非的未来。
The third category are those exporters that simply cannot maintain the input flows required to keep things going without a perfect constellation of unlikely geopolitical factors that are largely beyond their capacity to shape. They won’t face catastrophic production declines, but they’ll have to get used to agriculture becoming intermingled with geopolitical threats—and in some years that means crops simply won’t perform to snuff. This is the future for Brazil, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Pakistan, and South Africa.
出口商中的第四位是那些在秩序的农业强国中为自己开辟了一席之地但在混乱中发挥重要作用的机会为零的地方。他们的大部分供应链位于他们可以到达的领土之外，并且大多数人面临安全问题，这将使他们无法维持他们的业务照常进行：保加利亚、爱沙尼亚、捷克共和国、埃塞俄比亚、芬兰、德国、匈牙利、拉脱维亚、立陶宛、马里、罗马尼亚、斯洛伐克、赞比亚和津巴布韦。
Fourth among the exporters are those places that have carved out a place for themselves among the agricultural powers of the Order but have zero chance of playing a significant role in the Disorder. Most of their supply chains lie outside of territories they can reach, and most face security concerns that will make it impossible for them to maintain what has become their business as usual: Bulgaria, Estonia, Czech Republic, Ethiopia, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Mali, Romania, Slovakia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
真正绝望的是账本上的进口商一方。
The real desperation is on the importers’ side of the ledger.
第一类是那些在地理和外交上与出口商足够接近的国家，他们不必过分担心被切断：智利、哥伦比亚、厄瓜多尔、冰岛、印度尼西亚、马来西亚、墨西哥、挪威、秘鲁、菲律宾、葡萄牙、新加坡、和英国。日本也属于这一类，不是因为它靠近食品供应商，而是因为它有海军力量可以走出去并确保它需要的东西。
The first category are those who are close enough to exporters both geographically and diplomatically that they need not overworry about getting cut off: Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Iceland, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, Norway, Peru, the Philippines, Portugal, Singapore, and the United Kingdom. Japan also falls into this category not because it is close to food suppliers, but because it has the naval reach to go out and secure what it needs.
第二组进口商是让事情变得不舒服的地方。食物将会供应，但要付出一定的代价——而不是完全以金钱来计价的食物。这些进口商将需要屈服于供应商的意愿。如果他们不这样做，食品将被转移到其他地方：
The second group of importers is where things get uncomfortable. Food will be available, but at a price—and not one that is entirely denominated purely in financial terms. These importers will need to bend to their suppliers’ will. Should they not, foodstuffs will be directed elsewhere:
- 俄罗斯将利用这种粮食“外交”来帮助巩固对蒙古、塔吉克斯坦、土库曼斯坦和吉尔吉斯斯坦的控制。根据中亚河流在未来一到三十年内干涸的速度，俄罗斯人可能会发现自己要么与乌兹别克斯坦争夺中亚的主导地位，要么压倒绝望、长期遭受旱灾的乌兹别克斯坦。*
- Russia will use this food “diplomacy” to help consolidate control over Mongolia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Kyrgyzstan. Based upon how quickly the rivers of Central Asia dry up over the next one to three decades, the Russians could find themselves either competing with Uzbekistan for Central Asian dominance or overwhelming a desperate, perma-drought-stricken Uzbekistan.*
- 超级食品安全的法国将获得所有新殖民主义。巴黎将与比利时建立宗主国关系，将尝试与瑞士建立宗主国关系，并将与愿意的摩洛哥和突尼斯以及不愿意的阿尔及利亚加强联系。法国人还将在石油资源丰富的国家建立尽可能多的附属国，这些国家曾经是帝国时代法属西非的一部分，最著名的是加蓬、刚果（布拉柴维尔）和乍得。
- Hyper food-secure France is going to get all neocolonial. Paris will establish a suzerain relationship with Belgium, will attempt one with Switzerland, and will firm up links with a willing Morocco and Tunisia and an unwilling Algeria. The French will also establish as many dependencies as possible in the oil-rich states that are part of what was once known in imperial days as French West Africa, most notably Gabon, Congo (Brazzaville), and Chad.
- 印度将花费一些食物来拥有孟加拉国，而孟加拉国将发现自己处于世界上最糟糕的境地。喜马拉雅山南部降水减少意味着孟加拉国稻田的整体生产力将下降。但该国接收的水流更有可能在春季出现，届时它们很可能淹没水稻生产，对当地粮食生产造成双重打击。
- India will spend some food to own Bangladesh, which will find itself in the worst of all worlds. Less precipitation in the southern Himalayas means the overall productivity of Bangladeshi rice paddies will drop. But what water flows the country receives are more likely to be in the spring, when they could well overflood rice production, dealing local food production a double blow.
- 尼日利亚是唯一一个无需大量外部援助就能维持其农业产量的非洲国家，它将建立一个包括赤道几内亚、喀麦隆、乍得、尼日尔、布基纳法索、加纳、多哥和贝宁在内的势力范围。在公平竞争中，石油和天然气资源丰富的尼日利亚将发现自己在整个西非与法国人进行新殖民主义风格的较量，并且在比赛中表现相当不错。
- Nigeria, the only African nation that can maintain its agricultural output without extensive outside assistance, will establish a sphere of influence that includes Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon, Chad, Niger, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Togo, and Benin. In a bit of turnabout-is-fair-play, oil- and natural-gas-rich Nigeria will find itself sparring, neocolonial-style, with the French throughout West Africa, and doing reasonably well in the contest.
- 土耳其已经成为东地中海的主人。它将利用其优越的土地质量、温和的气候以及对该地区石油和贸易流量的控制，不仅可以维持其农业系统的运转，还可以从阿塞拜疆、格鲁吉亚、希腊、伊拉克、以色列、黎巴嫩和叙利亚获得地缘政治让步.
- Turkey was already going to emerge as the master of the Eastern Mediterranean. It will use its superior land quality, mild climate, and command of the region’s oil and trade flows not only to keep its agricultural system running, but also to extract geopolitical concessions from Azerbaijan, Georgia, Greece, Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, and Syria.
- 美国将通过食品贸易与中美洲国家和加勒比国家及岛屿（包括古巴）在各种问题上进行合作。在不太友好的条件下，美国人将使用食物作为手段之一，迫使委内瑞拉成为更符合其喜好的形状。在更友好的条件下，美国的食品外交将稳步将哥伦比亚转变为美国最快的朋友和盟友之一。
- The United States will trade food for cooperation on a variety of issues with the Central American states and the Caribbean nations and islands, including Cuba. On less friendly terms, the Americans will use food as one of the levers to force Venezuela into a shape more to its liking. On more friendly terms, American food diplomacy will steadily transform Colombia into one of America’s fastest friends and allies.
- 尽管两国都需要从更远的国外进口食物，但日本和英国可能会将其捆绑到一系列工具中，分别用于将它们的意志强加于韩国和爱尔兰。
- Even though both will need to bring in food from farther abroad, Japan and the United Kingdom will likely bundle it into the array of tools used to force their wills upon Korea and Ireland, respectively.
至于其余的，只是没有足够的食物可以四处走走。即使在命令下扩大国内生产也从未使这些地方能够自给自足。可能进口的食品要么是严重交换条件的一部分，要么代表既无法计划也无法依赖的幸福星座排列。中东（相对于其农业能力而言人口最稠密的地区）和撒哈拉以南非洲地区尚未提及的每个人都或多或少地依靠自己，并且随着全球农业投入不再可靠，人口向下转移是不可避免的。
As for the rest, there just won’t be enough food to go around. Expanding domestic production even under the Order never enabled these places to be self-sufficient. What food imports might arrive will either be part of a severe quid pro quo or will represent a happy constellational alignment that can neither be planned for nor relied upon. Everyone not already mentioned in the Middle East (the region most overpopulated relative to its agricultural capacity) and sub-Saharan Africa is more or less on their own, and with global agricultural inputs no longer reliable, downward population shifts are inevitable.
如果有的话，这个命中列表太过分了。. . 红润。自 1945 年以来，尤其是自 1992 年以来，世界一直生活在极端的卡路里过剩中。一个好的经验法则是，从动物中产生卡路里所需的投入大约是从植物中产生卡路里的九倍，而二战后的时代使绝大多数人能够大幅增加他们的动物消费。然而，我们所有人都清楚地知道，即使在这个物产丰富的时代，一些地方也没有足够的资源可供使用。这个问题是经济的——或者说是秩序所塑造的经济问题。
If anything, this hit list is overly . . . rosy. Since 1945 and especially since 1992 the world has been living in extreme calorie surplus. A good rule of thumb is that it takes about nine times as many inputs to generate a calorie from animals as it does from plants, and the post–World War II era has enabled the vast bulk of humanity to drastically up their animal consumption. Yet all of us are well aware that even in this time of plenty, some locations do not have enough to go around. The issue is economic—or economic as shaped by the Order.
海地是一个长期落后的国家，就是一个典型的例子。直到 20 世纪 80 年代中期，海地人的饮食主要是块根作物、玉米和一些小麦，这些作物要么热量不是特别高，要么普遍不适合海地的热带气候。海地人经常与饥荒擦肩而过。但海地位于世界农业超级大国的沿海地区，到 2010 年，美国种植的大米成为海地饮食中最大的单一组成部分。美国大米不仅比本土选择更可靠、热量更高，而且由于美国工业化农业的经济性，美国大米也比海地人自己种植的任何东西都便宜。
Haiti, a chronically undeveloped country, is a quintessential example. Until the mid-1980s, the Haitian diet was primarily root crops, maize, and some wheat, crops that were either not particularly calorie dense or were broadly inappropriate to Haiti’s tropical climate. The Haitian population often flirted with famine. But Haiti sits off the coast of the world’s agricultural superpower and by 2010, American-grown rice became the single largest component of the Haitian diet. Not only was U.S. rice more reliable and caloric than homegrown options, but also, because of the economics of America’s industrialized agriculture, American rice was also cheaper than anything the Haitians could grow themselves.
这种价格点脱节导致了三个后续影响。首先，更可靠、更可靠地到达的更便宜的食物在很大程度上摧毁了海地农业，无论是在直接生产方面，还是在保存未来重启生产所需的技能方面。其次，随着越来越贫困的人口寻求建造木筏并划船前往美国，整个主要农业系统的生计突然崩溃导致该国森林大量流失。然而，第三，海地人口翻了一番，这在很大程度上是因为食物太便宜了。
This price point disconnect contributed to three follow-on impacts. First, reliably cheaper food that arrived more reliably largely destroyed Haitian agriculture, both in terms of production directly and in the preservation of the skill sets required to reboot that production at a future date. Second, the sudden collapse of livelihoods throughout a largely agrarian system contributed to the vast denuding of the country’s forests as the increasingly destitute population sought to build rafts and paddle to the United States. And yet, third, the Haitian population doubled, in large part because food was so cheap.
海地甚至不是极端情况。许多州管理更差，正在遭受更大的农业崩溃，或两者兼而有之。我特别关注的是阿富汗、古巴、朝鲜、伊朗、委内瑞拉、也门、叙利亚、利比亚、津巴布韦、洪都拉斯、危地马拉、老挝、土库曼斯坦、伊拉克、苏丹、南苏丹、尼日尔和马里. 所有人都经历过人口激增，超出了他们的系统养活他们的能力，同时失去了对维持其前秩序人口的前工业化技能组合的掌握。对于这些地方中的许多地方来说，前秩序、前工业时代为生存而进行的斗争很快就会被认为是无法回到的高点。
Haiti isn’t even the extreme case. Many states are worse managed, are suffering greater agricultural collapses, or both. I’m particularly concerned, in no particular order, about Afghanistan, Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, Yemen, Syria, Libya, Zimbabwe, Honduras, Guatemala, Laos, Turkmenistan, Iraq, Sudan, South Sudan, Niger, and Mali. All have experienced population booms beyond their systems’ capacity to feed them, while simultaneously losing command of the preindustrial skill sets that sustained their pre-Order populations. For many of these places, the pre-Order, preindustrial struggle for subsistence will soon be thought of as a high point that cannot be returned to.
如果这些进口食品流动发生任何事情——如果发生任何事情，文明将陷入无政府状态并伴随着人口“修正”不仅是一种明显的可能性，而且是最有可能的结果。毕竟，一个无法养活其人民的政府就是一个倒台的政府。
Should something—should anything—happen to those imported food flows, civilizational collapse into anarchy complete with a population “correction” isn’t simply a distinct possibility, it is the most likely outcome. After all, a government that cannot feed its population is a government that falls.
这就是相对而言最大输家的故事。从绝对值来看，迄今为止最大的输家将是中国。中国位于世界上最长的供应路线的尽头，几乎所有东西都需要进口，包括大约 80% 的石油需求。中国海军缺乏通过贸易或征服获取农产品所需的航程，甚至缺乏种植和种植自己农产品的投入。
That’s the story of the biggest losers in relative terms. In absolute terms the biggest loser by far will be China. China sits at the end of the world’s longest supply routes for nearly everything it imports, including roughly 80 percent of its oil needs. China’s navy lacks the range necessary to secure, via trade or conquest, agricultural products—or even the inputs to grow and raise its own.
中国的人口崩溃表明劳动力和资本供应即将崩溃。而中国现有的、订单时代的农业在历史上金融最发达的经济体中，系统已经是金融最发达的部门。在未来的世界中，这一切都行不通。后秩序世界不会缺少饥荒。可能有超过 10 亿人会饿死，另有 20 亿人会长期营养不良。大约三分之二的中国人口面临着这两种命运中的一种。请记住，中国也是历史上老龄化速度最快的社会。那些将被要求应对——或忍受——大规模营养不良和饥荒的人将会变老。
China’s demographic collapse suggests imminent labor force and capital-supplies collapses. And China’s existing, Order-era agricultural system is already the most hyperinanced sector in history’s most hyperfinanced economy. There is nothing about this that will work in the world to come. There will be no shortage of famines in the post-Order world. Likely in excess of 1 billion people will starve to death, and another 2 billion will suffer chronic malnutrition. Some two-thirds of China’s population faces one of those two fates. And remember, China is also history’s most quickly aging society. The people who will be called upon to manage—or suffer through—mass malnutrition and famine are going to be old.
减轻饥荒
Mitigating Famine
确实没有多少方法可以避免本章所展示的那种大规模屠杀。幸运的是，“不多”并不等同于“没有”。
There really aren’t many ways to avoid the sort of mass carnage that this chapter is laying out. Luckily, “not many” is not synonymous with “none.”
输入的艺术与科学
THE ART AND SCIENCE OF INPUTS
防止饥荒的第一种方法是贡献一些以前没有添加的东西或技术，以提高产量。在 2022 年撰写本文时，很少有地方可以做到这一点，更不用说未来了，届时各种预先存在的投入将变得更加难以获得。事实上，我只能真正想出一个地方，这是按照工业时代农业规则的纯玩：缅甸。
The first way to prevent famine is to contribute some thing or technology that wasn’t being added previously, in order to increase yields. There are precious few places where this is possible at the time of this writing in 2022, much less in the future, when the various preexisting inputs will have become more difficult to source. In fact, I can only really come up with one place where this is a pure play according to the rules of Industrial Age agriculture: Myanmar.
随着帝国时代在 20 世纪初逐渐结束，缅甸（当时称为 Burma）是欧洲人在亚洲的殖民地中技术最落后的国家之一。当日本人在第二次世界大战期间从英国人手中夺取它时，它基本上没有工业化。英国人从未真正回去过。1948 年正式独立。1962 年的政变推翻了民选政府。新军政府认为没有电和汽车的人不太可能反抗，因此有目的地遵循去工业化政策。2010 年代后期民主的短暂复苏被 2021 年的另一次政变所压制。简而言之，如果世界分崩离析，它最终看起来会更像 2021 年的缅甸，而缅甸会看起来…… . . 或多或少相同。
As the Imperial Age wound down in the early twentieth century, Myanmar, then known as Burma, was among the most technologically backward of the Europeans’ Asian colonies. It was largely unindustrialized when the Japanese seized it from the British during World War II. The British never really went back. Formal independence came in 1948. Then a coup in 1962 ejected the democratically elected government. The new junta decided that people without electricity and cars would be less likely to revolt, and so purposefully followed a policy of deindustrialization. A brief resurgence of democracy in the late 2010s was squelched with another coup in 2021. Simply put, if the world falls apart, it will end up looking a lot more like 2021 Myanmar, while Myanmar will look . . . more or less the same.
但缅甸拥有世界上最好的水稻产区和最便宜的劳动力，还有一条可通航的河流——伊洛瓦底江——正好穿过最有前途的农业区。目前，西出于外交原因，世界已经使整个国家成为不受欢迎的人，但不难想象有人、某个地方会看着这个完美的农业设施并想，“嘿，我们可以从那里得到更多的大米，如果有人可以运送几袋化肥。” “所有”需要发生的是一些外部国家愿意忍受缅甸的专制和边缘种族灭绝的国内政策。对于印度或泰国来说，这可能不会成为问题。这两个国家 (a) 都是缅甸的邻国，(b) 拥有足够的工业基地和能源来源选择来满足一些农业需求，以及 (c)今天与缅甸几乎没有问题。再加上全球粮食短缺，两者都可能会与缅甸积极接触。也许甚至合作。
But Myanmar has some of the world’s best rice-producing terrain and cheapest labor, and a navigable river—the Irrawaddy—running right through the most promising agricultural zone. At present, the Western world has made the whole country persona non grata for diplomatic reasons, but it doesn’t take much imagination to think someone, somewhere will look at this perfect agricultural setup and think, “Hey, we could get a bunch more rice out of there if someone could ship in a few bags of fertilizer.” “All” that needs to happen is for some outside countries to be willing to stomach Myanmar’s authoritarian and borderline genocidal domestic policies. That probably won’t be a problem in the case of India or Thailand. Both countries (a) are Myanmar’s neighbors, (b) possess sufficient industrial bases and energy-sourcing options to supply some agricultural needs, and (c) barely have a problem with Myanmar today. Toss in global food shortages and both will likely engage Myanmar aggressively. Perhaps even cooperatively.
还有另一种投入可能至少部分替代设备和肥料等缺失的组件：劳动力。在这方面最受关注的国家是中国。
There’s another sort of input that might at least partially replace the missing components of equipment and fertilizer and such: labor. The country to watch most closely in this regard is China.
在 1979 年中国开始后毛时代的现代化之前，中国农村几乎没有拖拉机之类的东西。在人造肥料之类的领域也没有太多东西。*相反，农村人口在政治上、经济上、精神上和营养上都被文化大革命摧毁了，从本质上讲，文化大革命是一场全面的全国清洗，任何人以任何方式做任何事情，除了与任何扭曲的思想相匹配的东西当时在毛泽东的脑子里跑来跑去。关键是这里的人口基本上是被压垮的农民，手工耕作小块田地，对每一株植物给予个人关注，失去了过去两个世纪开发的任何技术。从技术上讲，它根本不是农业。它是园艺。
Before the country’s post-Mao modernization began in 1979, there were next to no tractors and such in the Chinese countryside. Nor was there much of anything in the realm of artificial fertilizers and the like.* Instead, the rural population had been politically, economically, spiritually, and nutritionally gutted by the Cultural Revolution, which was, in essence, a full national purge of anyone who did anything in any way aside from what matched up with whatever twisted thought was running through Mao’s brain at the time. The point is that the population was basically a crushed peasantry, working small-plot fields by hand, giving individual attention to every individual plant, bereft of any of the technologies that had been developed in the past two centuries. Technically it wasn’t farming at all. It was gardening.
前工业园艺并不愚蠢。实际上，它实际上非常高效。只是在先进的世界里，我们将其视为一种爱好或补充。但如果园艺是一份全职工作，如果这是唯一的方法粮食生产，如果劳动力是无限的和免费的，它实际上可以让某些形式的工业化农业在每英亩的产量水平上与他们的钱竞争。
Preindustrial gardening isn’t stupid. In reality, it is actually wildly productive. It’s just that in the advanced world, we consider it as a hobby or supplement. But if gardening is a full-time job and if it is the only method of food production and if the labor is bottomless and free, it can actually give some forms of industrialized agriculture a run for their money in output levels per acre.
在中国即将置身的世界中，中国人需要做出一些非常艰难的选择。汽车用油还是拖拉机用油？天然气用于发电还是用于化肥？没有客户的大规模制造或食品生产的劳动力？这些都不是愉快的话题，但国家解体或饥荒也不是。中国最好的选择可能是残酷的、国家组织的反恐行动有点像文化大革命的城市化运动，将 5 亿左右的人变回园丁。我们很快就会知道，中国过去四十年的超级城市化运动是否已经从人口中挤出了所有与食品生产相关的技能。无论如何，去城市化远不足以阻止全国性饥荒——如果没有充分利用全球系统提供食品和农业投入，中国根本无法维持现有人口——但大规模去城市化可能——可能——产生足够的食物来维持这一概念中国作为一个政治实体。
In the world China is about to find itself in, the Chinese will need to make some seriously difficult choices. Oil for automobiles or for tractors? Natural gas for electricity or for fertilizers? Labor for mass manufacturing, for which there are no customers, or for food production? None of these are pleasant topics, but neither is national disintegration or famine. China’s best bet will likely be a brutal, state-organized deurbanization campaign that somewhat resembles the Cultural Revolution, to turn a half billion people or so back into gardeners. We’ll know soon whether the PRC’s hyperurbanization campaign of the past four decades has squeezed all food-production-related skills out of the population. Regardless, deurbanization will be nowhere near enough to head off national famine—China simply cannot maintain its current population without full access to the global system to provide foodstuffs and agricultural inputs—but mass deurbanization just might—might—generate enough food to preserve the concept of China as a political entity.
也许吧。
Schmaybe.
世界上其他面临大规模饥荒的地区也可能会发生某种形式的去城市化，以释放更多劳动力用于农业，而埃及或许位列这一沉闷名单的首位。撒哈拉以南非洲的大部分地区也不甘落后。在这方面，撒哈拉以南非洲人可能面临比埃及人稍微不那么可怕的未来。大约一半的埃及人生活在被工业时代技术开垦的沙漠上。如果将埃及撒哈拉沙漠的部分地区变成绿色的电动泵出现任何问题，那么，pzzzzzzt。撒哈拉以南非洲的农业用地可能不是（任何接近）世界上最好的，但至少其中大部分都能下雨。
Some version of deurbanization to free up more labor for agriculture is likely to happen in the other parts of the world that face mass famine as well, with perhaps Egypt at the top of that dreary list. Much of sub-Saharan Africa won’t be far behind. In this the sub-Saharan Africans probably face a slightly less scary future than the Egyptians. About half the Egyptian population lives on desert that was reclaimed by Industrial Age technologies. Should anything happen to the electricity-driven pumps that turn portions of the Egyptian Sahara green, well then, pzzzzzzt. Agricultural lands in sub-Saharan Africa may not be (anywhere close to) the world’s best, but at least most of them get rain.
还有另一种“输入”很可能在完全不同的地理环境中被证明是有用的。世界上最好的温带农田，主要局限于不太可能遭受严重破坏的发达国家，将能够将数字技术应用于农业。
There’s another sort of “input” that is highly likely to prove useful in a completely different sort of geography. The world’s best temperate zone farmlands, the ones largely confined to advanced countries unlikely to experience severe disruptions, will be able to apply digital technologies to agriculture.
通常，当我们想到数字化时，我们会想到在线申请贷款或在 COVID 期间在家工作或在智能手机上胡说八道，但数字化也适用于一些极其以农业为中心的技术。
Normally when we think of digitization we’re thinking of online applications for loans or working from home during COVID or blah-blah-blahing away on smartphones, but digitization also applies to a few techs that are extremely ag-centric.
首先，显而易见的应用：基因组学。我们都听说过转基因生物，这是一系列数字技术的巅峰之作，这些技术使我们能够改变植物的特性，使它们更能抵抗盐分、干旱、高温、寒冷、害虫和/或真菌。还有一种叫做“基因编辑”的东西，它与转基因生物的制造非常相似，但对基因组的调整更有针对性，并且可以——至少在理论上——自然发生或通过杂交等更传统的方法发生。基因编辑只是加快了从几十代到一代的过程。
First, the obvious application: genomics. We’ve all heard of genetically modified organisms, the culmination of a series of digital technologies that allow us to modify characteristics of plants to make them more resistant to salt, drought, heat, cold, pests, and/or fungus. There’s also something called “gene editing,” which is pretty similar to the making of GMOs, but the tweaks to the genome are more targeted and could—theoretically at least—occur naturally or via more traditional methods such as crossbreeding. Gene editing simply speeds up the process from dozens of generations to one.
最重要的是，现在存在的技术可以破解植物并让它们花费更多的精力进行繁殖（即种植人类最终食用的部分）。这增加了产量，同时减少了输入要求。从杂交育种到选择性育种再到基因改造和基因编辑，一切都可以实现的最好例子也许是当代玉米。
The bottom line is that technologies now exist to hack plants and get them to spend more energy on propagating (that is, growing the bits that humans ultimately eat). That increases yields while reducing input requirements. Perhaps the best example of what can be achieved with everything from crossbreeding to selective breeding to genetic modification and genetic editing is contemporary corn.
我们称为玉米（如果您是欧洲人，则称为玉米）的植物是一组称为类蜀黍的草类的后代。野生品种的可食用部分是坚硬、坚韧、大约一英寸的谷粒穗，包裹在坚硬的壳状种子壳中。毫不奇怪，就每英亩产量而言，这些是迄今为止产量最低的古代种植园。快进到今天大约一万一千年的人类修修补补，加上工业时代的投入，玉米每英亩的产量一直是最高的。在即将到来的产量和输入可用性降低的世界中，您可以看到优势。
The plant we know as corn (or maize if you are European) is descended from a group of grasses known as teosintes. The edible portions of wild varieties are a hard, tough, roughly one-inch spike of kernels encased in tough, shell-like seed cases. Unsurprisingly, these were by far the least productive of ancient plantings in terms of per-acre yields. Fast-forward through roughly eleven thousand years of human tinkering to today, add in Industrial Age inputs, and corn consistently generates the greatest output per acre. In a soon-to-be world of reduced yields and input availability, you can see the advantages.
其次，不太明显的应用：面部识别。在民主国家，最常见的用途是解锁手机。在中国，最常见的用途是让政府随时了解你在哪里、和谁在一起以及你在做什么。在农业中，新兴的用途是安装在拖拉机上的计算机在拖拉机穿过田地时单独评估每一株植物，首先识别它，然后然后确定应该对它或为它做什么，最后向连接的设备发出信号以采取行动。这种植物是杂草吗？喷除草剂。植物是否感染了虫子？喷杀虫剂。是黄色的吗？喷肥料。农民将不再需要在他们的整个田地中使用撒播喷雾，每种喷雾类型一次。现在，他们可以简单地用各种输入重新装载一堆罐子，并通过或多或少自行驱动的钻机进行一次传递，为每个单独的植物提供定制的、即时的关注。它与其说是工业化农业，不如说是数字园艺，每一株植物都得到专注的关注。. . 只是不是来自人类。
Second, the less obvious application: facial recognition. In democracies, the most common use is to unlock your phone. In China, the most common use is for the government to know where you are, who you are with, and what you’re doing at any given second. In agriculture the emerging use is for a tractor-mounted computer to individually evaluate every single plant as the tractor rolls through the field, first to identify it, and then to determine what should be done to or for it, and finally to signal an attached apparatus to take action. Is the plant a weed? Squirt of herbicide. Is the plant infested with bugs? Squirt of pesticide. Is it yellow? Squirt of fertilizer. No longer will farmers have to use broadcast sprays over their entire fields, one pass per spray type. Now they can simply reload a bunch of canisters with the various inputs and make a single pass giving customized, on-the-fly attention to each individual plant via a rig that more or less drives itself. It isn’t so much industrial farming as it is digital gardening, where every plant gets dedicated attention . . . just not from a human.
总而言之，基因改造种子和数字园艺有望在 2030 年前至少使每英亩作物产量翻一番，同时将化学投入和燃料需求减少多达四分之三。
Taken together, genetically tweaked seeds plus digital gardening promise to—at a minimum—double crop yields per acre by 2030, while simultaneously reducing chemical inputs and fuel needs by up to three-quarters.
然而，这是假设农民有能力使用新的投入物。农用设备已经是平民可以购买的最昂贵的设备之一，与非数字化工业先驱相比，新的数字园艺设备无疑将花费三倍的购买成本和三倍多的维护成本。这种投资只对农场规模大、资金供应充足的行作物有意义：美国、加拿大和澳大利亚是大规模应用的。法国、德国、荷兰和新西兰有一些大型中耕作物农场，可能符合条件。少数在政治上关系密切的巴西大型农场可能会参与其中。阿根廷将是一个扣篮如果阿根廷政府可以承认它没有希望在国内制造这种设备，因此允许低关税进口。
However, this assumes that farmers will be able to afford to apply the new inputs. Farm equipment is already among the most expensive gear civilians can purchase, and the new digital gardening equipment undoubtedly will cost triple to purchase and far more than triple to maintain as compared to its nondigitized industrial forebears. Such investments only make sense for row crops where the farms are huge and capital supplies ample: United States, Canada, and Australia are it for large-scale application. There are a few large row-crop farms in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and New Zealand that might qualify. A handful of politically well-connected Brazilian megafarms might be able to play. Argentina will be a slam dunk if the Argentine government can admit it has no hope of manufacturing this sort of equipment domestically and so allow for low-tariff imports.
但是那个。. . 也就是说，每个人都可能体验到与输入相关的改进。
But that . . . that is everyone who might be able to experience input-related improvements.
放松“进步”
UNWINDING “PROGRESS”
减轻饥荒的第二种方法是种植更符合当地需求而非全球需求的产品。许多这些流离失所的作物在过去几十年为全球健康和财富做出贡献的那些将消失。
The second means of mitigating famine is to grow products more in line with local, rather than global, demand. Many of those displacement crops that have contributed to global health and wealth these past few decades will go away.
根据气候、地理和文化，预计会出现三种模式。
Expect three patterns to manifest, based on climate, geography, and culture.
首先，大规模、出口驱动的单一养殖将让位于小规模、本地驱动的多元养殖。这将（有希望地）帮助满足当地社区的热量和营养需求，但这将以规模经济为代价。无论您是从投入、范围、技术、资本还是种植偏好的角度来看，地球上生产的食物总量都必须下降。
First, large-scale, export-driven monoculture will give way to small-scale, local-driven polyculture. That will (hopefully) help serve the caloric and nutritional needs of local communities, but it will come at the cost of economies of scale. Whether you look at it from the point of view of inputs or reach or tech or capital or planting preferences, the volume of foods produced on Earth in aggregate must decline.
其次，小麦播种面积将大幅回升。. . 在它们以非常大的方式消失之后。
Second, wheat plantings will come back in a very big way . . . after they disappear in a very big way.
工业时代所有农作物的投入计算——更好的融资、更好的设备、合成肥料、杀虫剂和除草剂——也适用于小麦。将小麦完全不挑剔的特性与高辛烷值的工业投入结合起来，你就有了全球小麦产量几十年来飙升的原因。如此持续的高供应量导致小麦价格下跌。这使得这种谷物毫无吸引力，但由于几乎所有的小麦都生长在贫瘠的土地上，很少有小麦种植者可以选择种植其他作物。
The same input math that was in play for all agricultural crops in the Industrial Age—better financing, better equipment, synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides—applies to wheat as well. Combine wheat’s utter lack of persnicketiness with the high-octane industrial inputs and you have the reason why global wheat output has soared for decades. Such consistently high supplies have driven wheat prices down. That makes the grain decidedly unsexy, but since nearly all wheat is grown on marginal land, few wheat farmers have the option of growing something else.
现在把本书的所有其他课程合上：交通、金融、能源、工业材料、制造业。大多数小麦只生长在只有小麦才能生长的地方，但只要输入流不中断，它就只能在那些地方生长。去全球化告诉我们，在大多数这样的地方，都会出现严重的破坏。在全球范围内，我们正处于人类第一大食品短缺的边缘。
Now fold in all the other lessons of this book: in transport, in finance, in energy, in industrial materials, in manufacturing. Most wheat is grown only in places where only wheat can grow, but it can only grow in those places so long as the input streams are not interrupted. Deglobalization tells us that in most such locations, there will be a helluva disruption. Globally, we are on the verge of a shortage in humanity’s number one foodstuff.
而且不只是那个。缺乏投入使得大多数出口作物或经济作物无法生存，甚至在全球运输中断阻止这些作物到达最终买家之前也是如此。无论是因为你不能进口小麦，还是因为你只能吃这么多鳄梨，全世界的农民都别无选择，只能转移种植面积。大规模种植小麦，加上受气候影响的主粮，如凉爽气候下的燕麦、大麦和黑麦，以及热带地区的木薯，是未来的趋势。
And not just that one. A lack of inputs makes most for-export or cash-crops nonviable even before global transport breakdowns prevent such crops from making it to end buyers. Whether because you cannot import wheat or because you can only eat so many avocados, farmers the world over will have no choice but to shift plantings. Wide-scale wheat, augmented by climatically dictated staples such as oats, barley, and rye in cooler climates, and cassava in the tropics, is the wave of the future.
考虑一下：像英国、俄罗斯、阿联酋这样的国家，波兰和蒙古目前正处于其历史烹饪多样性的顶峰。在未来几年，除非他们能够加入其他人的贸易网络，否则他们最多只能冒着回到 19 世纪中叶饮食的风险，但如果没有他们过去能够从各自的殖民地参与和贸易关系中获得的进口，以增加微薄的国内生产选择。稀粥、粥和糊状物在招手——星期天还有一点卷心菜。
Consider this: countries like the United Kingdom, Russia, the UAE, Poland, and Mongolia are currently at the apex of their historical culinary diversity. In coming years, unless they can join someone else’s trading network, they risk at best going back to the diets of the mid-nineteenth century, but without the imports they used to be able to access from their respective colonial involvements and trade relationships to augment meagre domestic production options. Gruels, porridges, and mush beckon—with a little cabbage on Sundays.
第三，这是导致农村贫困的良方。取消单一栽培会降低规模经济。恢复种植小麦会消除经济作物以及由此产生的收入。自 1945 年以来，从事农业的人数下降了 80%，而农村总收入却有所增加。不是农村人均收入，而是农村每亩收入。按人均计算，农业用地经历了人类历史上一些最大的收入增长。如果没有国际化的输入流或国际出口选项，其中的大部分现在都会消失。
Third, this is a recipe for gross rural poverty. Removing monoculture reduces economies of scale. Returning to wheat removes cash crops and the income that comes from them. Since 1945 the number of people involved in agriculture has plunged by 80 percent while gross rural incomes have increased. Not rural incomes per person, but instead rural incomes per acre. In per capita terms agricultural lands have experienced some of the greatest income increases in human history. Without internationalized input flows or international export options, much of this will now unwind.
扩展早期的新西兰和埃及的例子，这些例子巧妙地将未来减产、作物转移和农村影响的极端情况包括在内：
Extend the earlier Kiwi and Egyptian examples, which neatly bracket the extremes of future yield reductions, crop shifting, and rural impacts:
- 打破太平洋贸易规范，新西兰人的奶制品和水果将超过他们的销售能力，而小麦将不足以制作面包。地中海地区的贸易规范被打破，埃及人将拥有大量额外的棉花——然后挨饿。*
- Shatter Pacific trade norms and the Kiwis will be left with more dairy and fruit than they can sell, and not enough wheat to make bread. Shatter trade norms in the Mediterranean and the Egyptians will have lots of extra cotton—and starve.*
- 区域地理也很重要：新西兰可以很容易地从澳大利亚和西半球粮食丰富的地区获得粮食供应，从而实现合理程度的持续专业化和食品贸易。澳大利亚和新西兰尤其适合继续成为彼此最可靠的贸易伙伴。与位于地中海与东非交汇处的埃及相比——这两个地区都已经粮食匮乏。
- The regional geography matters, too: New Zealand enjoys easy access to food supplies from food-rich regions in Australia and the Western Hemisphere, enabling a reasonable degree of continued specialization and food product trade. Australia and New Zealand are, in particular, well tailored to continue being each other’s most reliable trading partner. Compare that to Egypt, located where the Mediterranean meets East Africa—both regions that are already food-poor.
- 人口统计也发挥了作用：从区域食品供应的角度来看，新西兰的 500 万人口只不过是一个四舍五入的误差，而养活 100 多万埃及人就像一只吞下炮弹的猫。埃及现在的人口如此之多，即使该国能够维持工业投入，将所有生产用地转为种植小麦，也仍然无法提供足够的热量。但埃及人必须尝试。另一种选择是简单地死去。
- Demographics comes into play as well: from a regional food-supply point of view, New Zealand’s population of 5 million isn’t much more than a rounding error, while supporting 100+ million Egyptians will be like a cat swallowing a cannonball. Egypt’s population is now so large that even if the country were able to maintain industrial inputs and it shifted all its productive lands over to wheat cultivation, it still wouldn’t be enough to provide enough calories. But the Egyptians have to try. The alternative is to simply die.
- 顾名思义，即将到来的小麦抢购潮意味着其他产品将面临大幅减产。具体就埃及而言，这意味着国际市场的棉花和柑橘减少。但他们不是大男孩。就国际贸易作物而言，棉花和柑橘分列第十七和第十六位。更为重要的是这三种作物，它们与小麦一起提供了人类大部分的食物摄入量。
- This coming rush to wheat by definition means that other products will face drastic production reductions. In the case of Egypt specifically, this means less cotton and citrus for international markets. But they aren’t the big boys. In terms of internationally traded crops, cotton and citrus rank seventeenth and sixteenth. Far more important are the three crops that, along with wheat, provide the bulk of humanity’s food intake.
扩大饮食，缩小饮食
Expanding the Diet, Shrinking the Diet
让我们从玉米和大豆开始，它们分别在国际贸易食品中排名第四和第一。
Let’s begin with corn and soy, which rank fourth and first among internationally traded food commodities, respectively.
与小麦、玉米和大豆一样，它们都是在史前时代最先被种植和驯化的。数百代的选择性育种使玉米为玛雅和阿兹特克帝国提供动力，而大豆。. . 反弹了很多。它肯定是在东北亚的某个地方被驯化的，*但后来它沿着几乎所有已知的贸易路线在世界各地游荡，直到哥伦布探险。那时大豆首次被引入西半球，这改变了一切。
Like wheat, corn and soy were both first cultivated and domesticated deep in prehistory. Hundreds of generations of selective breeding enabled corn to power the Mayan and Aztec empires, while soy . . . bounced around a lot. It was definitely domesticated somewhere in Northeast Asia,* but then it wandered the world with pretty much every known trade route right up to the Columbus expeditions. At that point soy was introduced to the Western Hemisphere for the first time, and that changed everything.
玉米和大豆都有奇特的特性，使它们成为当代西半球典型的作物。
Both corn and soy have peculiar quirks that make them quintessential contemporary Western Hemispheric crops.
- 玉米喜热喜湿。它在美国中西部、阿根廷潘帕斯草原和巴西塞拉多的繁盛程度远胜于欧洲或东北亚，这些地区往往更凉爽或更干燥，或两者兼而有之。
- Corn loves heat and loves humidity. It thrives in the American Midwest, the Argentine Pampas, and the Brazilian Cerrado far better than in Europe or Northeast Asia, regions that tend to be cooler or drier or both.
- 玉米和大豆都是典型的中耕作物。这鼓励了机械化的使用，这反过来又推动越来越大的油田为设备买单。纯属偶然，东半球并没有那么多合适的跨地平线场。（东半球的大部分大田都在澳大利亚或俄罗斯，这些国家的土地要么太干要么太湿要么太冷不适合种植大豆。）
- Both corn and soy are quintessential row crops. That encourages the use of mechanization, which in turn pushes for larger and larger fields to pay for the equipment. Simply by happenstance, there just aren’t all that many appropriate horizon-spanning fields in the Eastern Hemisphere. (Most of the Eastern Hemisphere’s large fields are in Australia or Russia, countries whose lands are either too dry or too wet or too cold for soy.)
- 玉米需要帮助繁殖。从历史上看，驯化玉米需要人工授粉，而现代杂交种需要通过称为去雄的过程进行管理授粉。从本质上讲，田间的一部分玉米植株的花（又名雄穗）必须被移除，这样正确的基因组合才能结出果实（玉米棒）。这是一种季节性很强的工作，与新世界农业的大农场、年轻的人口结构、小镇文化和劳动经济学大致相匹配。*即使俄罗斯或澳大利亚有气候，他们仍然缺乏提供劳动力的农村人口密度。
- Corn needs help propagating. Historically, domesticated corn required artificial pollination, while contemporary hybrids require managed pollination via a process called detasseling. In essence, a portion of corn plants in a field must have their flowers (aka the tassels) removed so the correct genetic mix can contribute to the fruit (the cob). It is sharply seasonal work that broadly matches up with the large farms, young demographic-structure, small-town culture, and labor economics of New World agriculture.* Even if Russia or Australia had the climate, they would still lack the rural population density to supply the labor.
- 当日照时数降至约 12.8 小时以下时，大豆在生物学上会开花，但与玉米一样，它也需要热量和湿度。在东半球，只有黑海西岸和北岸拥有这种热量、湿度和季节性变化的完美结合。但该地区的所有大豆农田占西半球适合大豆种植的气候区的不到 7%，最显着的是阿根廷的科尔多瓦、美国的爱荷华州和巴西的巴拉那州。毫不奇怪，大约 70% 的世界玉米出口和 85% 的大豆出口来自三个国家：阿根廷、巴西和美国。
- Soy is biologically wired to flower when the number of daylight hours drops below about 12.8, but, like corn, it also craves heat and humidity. About the only locations with this perfect mix of heat and humidity and seasonal variation in the Eastern Hemisphere are on the western and northern shores of the Black Sea. But all the soy farmland in that region amounts to less than 7 percent of the soy-matching climate zones in the Western Hemisphere, most notably in Argentina’s Cordoba, America’s Iowa, and Brazil’s Parana. Unsurprisingly, something like 70 percent of the world’s corn exports and 85 percent of its soy exports come from three countries: Argentina, Brazil, and the United States.
- 东半球最大的玉米和大豆出口国是乌克兰，世界不应该依赖这个国家。问题比比皆是。该国太穷，无法负担玉米和大豆所需的机械化，而该国的能源、炼油和制造能力薄弱。但安全胜过一切。在 2022 年 2 月 28 日对本段进行调整时，俄罗斯人正沉浸在入侵乌克兰的事件中。战争可能会以多种方式展开，但至少，2022 年的播种季节将被打乱，让世界预见到未来的粮食短缺。上一次前苏联地区农产品出口中断发生在 2010 年。小麦价格翻了一番。在许多结果中，一个结果是抗议、政府垮台和阿拉伯之春的战争。
- The biggest Eastern Hemispheric exporter for both corn and soy is Ukraine, a country the world should not depend upon. Issues abound. The country is too poor to afford the mechanization that corn and soy require, while the country’s energy, refining, and manufacturing capacity is thin. But security trumps everything. At the time of this paragraph’s tweaking on February 28, 2022, the Russians are eyeballs-deep in their invasion of Ukraine. The war may unfold in many ways, but at a minimum, the 2022 planting season will be disrupted, giving the world a preview of the food shortages of the future. The previous instance of disruptions of agricultural exports from the former Soviet space occurred in 2010. The price of wheat doubled. One outcome, among many, was the cavalcade of protests, government collapses, and wars of the Arab Spring. Far worse lies ahead.
在大多数情况下，这种特定的置换和分化将被证明是积极的。西半球供应链在半球内基本上是独立的，这表明任何中断都应该是有限的和可管理的。这反过来意味着去全球化不会迫使世界玉米和大豆生产状况崩溃。
For the most part, this specific displacement and differentiation will prove to be a positive. Western Hemispheric supply chains are broadly self-contained within the hemisphere, suggesting that any disruptions should be limited and manageable. That in turn means deglobalization will not force a collapse in the world’s production profile for corn and soy.
这并不是说配置文件不会改变。它会。它会发生巨大变化，但不是因为去全球化中断输入访问的痛苦和冲击。相反，它会因为市场需求的变化而改变。
This is not to say that profile will not change. It will. It will change drastically, but not because of the pain and shock of deglobalization interrupting input access. Rather, it will change because of a change in market demand.
总之，玉米被搞砸了。你买来烤或蒸的玉米棒子并不是覆盖内布拉斯加州、爱荷华州和伊利诺斯州永无止境的田野的东西。你吃的东西叫甜玉米；它占美国种植的玉米的不到 1%。你在中西部看到的是一种叫做田间玉米或马齿玉米的东西。通过一种叫做碱化的过程，它使用热量和某种碱性溶液，田间玉米可以变成像马萨一样的食物，但对于大多数人来说，玉米的用途不同于直接食用。
Corn is, in a word, screwed. That corn on the cob you buy for grilling or steaming is not the stuff that blankets the never-ending fields of Nebraska, Iowa, and Illinois. The stuff you eat is called sweet corn; it makes up less than 1 percent of the corn grown in the United States. What you see across the Midwest is something called field or dent corn. Via a process called nixtamalization, which uses heat and some sort of alkaline solution, field corn can be turned into a food like masa, but for most people, corn has different uses than direct consumption.
世界上最大和最具创造力的玉米消费者是美国人，他们生产如此惊人的玉米数量，他们认为将其加工成数千种产品是合理的，从高果糖玉米糖浆到人造塑料瓶到火花塞陶瓷再到校舍粉笔。迄今为止，这些产品中销量最大的是俗称乙醇的生物燃料。补贴和强制要求的组合要求美国汽油中含有 10-15% 的玉米产品，这听起来并不过分，直到你意识到在乙醇的高峰期，大约一半的美国玉米收获被转化为汽油添加剂。该命令吸收了如此多的玉米，它不仅推高了玉米价格，还推高了几乎所有农作物的价格。玉米：小麦、大豆、棉花和干草从竞争中脱颖而出，由于饲料成本较高，猪肉和牛肉也是如此。
The world’s biggest and most creative field corn consumers are the Americans, who produce field corn in such prodigious quantities, they feel it reasonable to process it into thousands of products, ranging from high-fructose corn syrup to faux-plastic bottles to sparkplug ceramics to schoolhouse chalk. The biggest volume of those products by far is the biofuel colloquially known as ethanol. A mix of subsidies and mandates requires American gasoline to contain 10–15 percent of the corn-based product, which doesn’t sound like too much until you realize that at ethanol’s peak, some half of the American corn harvest was being turned into a gasoline additive. The mandate absorbed so much corn it drove up not just corn prices, but the prices of pretty much all crops by displacing farm acres to corn: wheat, soy, cotton, and hay got decidedly perky from the competition, as did pork and beef due to the higher costs for feed.
对于世界其他地区，用作动物饲料是玉米的主要用途。
For the rest of the world, serving as animal feed is corn’s primary purpose.
在收入不断增加的全球化后期时代，这很好。随着人们赚更多的钱，他们想吃更多的肉。但在后全球化时代在收入锐减的时代，世界上大部分地区的大多数人都没有足够的财富每天享用动物蛋白。预计在任何生产不满足区域需求或依赖进口玉米喂养动物的国家，玉米需求都会随着大规模畜牧业的崩溃而崩溃。这将首先打击乌拉圭和澳大利亚等肉类生产商，第二类打击韩国和中国等肉类消费者。
In the late-globalization era of rising incomes, this is just fine. As people earn more money, they want to eat more meat. But in a post-globalized era of collapsing incomes, most people in most of the world will not be wealthy enough to enjoy animal protein on a daily basis. Expect corn demand to collapse right along with large-scale animal husbandry in any country whose production does not serve regional demand or that relies upon imported corn to fatten up its animals. That will hit meat producers like Uruguay and Australia in the first category, and meat consumers like Korea and China in the second.
玉米失去什么，大豆就会获得什么。大豆也是一种动物饲料。事实上，由于其蛋白质含量较高，在许多情况下大豆是上乘的原料。然而，与大田玉米不同，大豆可以很容易地加工供人类食用。由于大豆是一种植物，因此与汉堡包和猪排相比，大豆蛋白价格便宜。在一个去全球化、不连贯的世界中，根本不会存在维持当前全球规模的畜牧业所需的同样庞大的向上流动的肉食者群体。这种从高成本动物蛋白到低成本植物蛋白的转变是一个必要的转变，可能会使大约 10 亿人免于饿死。*如果您不住在西半球、欧洲或澳大拉西亚，是时候升级您的豆腐游戏了。
What corn loses, soy gains. Soy is also an animal fodder. In fact, due to its higher protein content, in many cases soy is the superior input. Unlike field corn, however, soy easily can be processed for human consumption. And since soy is a plant, soy-based protein is cheap compared to hamburgers and pork chops. In a deglobalized, disconnected world there simply isn’t going to be the same giant pool of upwardly mobile meat-eaters required to sustain animal husbandry on its current, global scale. This shift from high-cost animal protein to low-cost plant protein is a necessary transformation that will probably save a billion people or so from starving to death.* If you don’t live in the Western Hemisphere, Europe, or Australasia, it’s time to up your tofu game.
然而，很可能即使大规模的玉米生产让位于更大规模的大豆生产，我们仍然无法获得足够的大豆。问题出在全球化后期最大的大豆出口国巴西。巴西凭借五个因素占据了地幔：
However, there is a distinct probability that even with large-scale corn production giving way to ever-larger-scale soy production, we still won’t even have enough soy. The problem is Brazil, the largest soy exporter of the late globalized period. Brazil holds that mantle due to five factors:
- 巴西科学家破解大豆的基因组以调整日照时间要求，以便该植物能够在该国更赤道的农田中开花和成熟。（在赤道附近，夏季和冬季的白昼长度几乎相同，所以大豆永远不知道该做什么，也不会成熟。）这项科学壮举使巴西能够将大豆生产扩大到南部更温和的省份之外，例如南里奥格兰德州到其更赤道和热带的省份，如马托格罗索州。这一调整占全球大豆出口量的三分之一。
- Brazilian scientists hacked soy’s genome to tweak the daylight-hours requirement so the plant can flower and mature in the country’s more equatorially located farmlands. (Near the equator, summer and winter have nearly identical day lengths, so soy never knew what to do and wouldn’t mature.) This scientific feat enabled Brazil to expand soy production beyond its southern, more temperate provinces such as Rio Grande do Sul to its more equatorial and tropical provinces, such as Mato Grosso. This one tweak is responsible for some one-third of global soy exports.
- 巴西的大豆出口距离亚洲市场尽可能远。他们需要绕过南美洲的一角或穿越南大西洋到达好望角，然后沿着可能最长的航道穿越太平洋或印度洋。与它们的重量或体积相比，大多数食物的价值都非常低。50 磅黄金价值约 25,000 美元，您可以将其握在手中。五十磅铝值大约 50 美元，你可以把它装进一个桶里。50 磅大豆大约需要 10 美元，并且需要一辆手推车。除非你是那些幸运的帝国中心之一，拥有良好的内部水路运输选择，否则直到 18 世纪，大多数人甚至都没有考虑从距离生产地点几英里以外的地方采购食物。在工业化秩序中，这无关紧要。
- Brazil’s soy exports are as physically far from Asian markets as is possible on the planet. They need to be sailed either around the tip of South America or across the South Atlantic to the Cape of Good Hope, before crossing the Pacific or Indian Ocean along the longest possible crossing. Most foods are very low value compared to their weight or volume. Fifty pounds of gold is worth about $25,000 and you can hold it in your hands. Fifty pounds of aluminum is worth about $50 and you can fit it into a bucket. Fifty pounds of soy would run you about $10 and require a wheelbarrow. Unless you were one of those lucky Imperial Centers with good internal water transport options, most of humanity didn’t even consider sourcing food from more than a few miles from production sites until the eighteenth century. In the industrialized Order, this doesn’t matter. Long-haul, low-cost shipping has become ubiquitous.
- 巴西的近热带土壤营养极度贫乏，巴西的主要大豆产区没有经历过冬季虫害。从好的方面来看，没有冬天意味着大多数巴西大豆（和玉米）农民可以双倍（甚至三倍！）收成。不利的一面是，不仅昆虫、杂草和霉菌是一个长期存在的问题，而且砍伐森林开垦农田消除了大部分自然压力，因此各种虫子可以将它们的基因努力集中在抵抗农药上。在美国中西部，每十年左右必须重新配制的杀虫剂、除草剂和杀菌剂在巴西需要每两到三年进行一次大修。因此，巴西的中耕作物农业在每单位产出的肥料、杀虫剂、除草剂和杀菌剂方面的投入成本世界最高。
- Brazil’s near-tropical soils are extraordinarily nutrient-poor and Brazil’s primary soy-producing regions do not experience winter bug kills. On the upside, the lack of winter means most Brazilian soy (and corn) farmers can double- (and even triple-!) crop. On the downside, not only are insects, weeds, and molds a constant problem, but the clear-cutting of forests to create farmland has removed most natural pressures, so the various bugs can focus their genetic efforts on resisting agricultural chemicals. Pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides that must be reformulated every decade or so in the American Midwest require overhauls every two to three years in Brazil. Consequently, Brazilian row-crop agriculture has the world’s highest input costs in fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides per unit of output. In the globalized period of easy input supply and easier product sales, this is but a footnote.
- 与阿根廷和美国的大豆生产一样，巴西的大部分大豆生产在内陆深处。与阿根廷或美国不同，巴西缺乏平坦的海岸地理环境，无法通过廉价的铁路和河流运输系统运送其农产品。巴西的大部分大豆由卡车运输。这需要大量廉价的，进口资本为必要的基础设施提供资金。在婴儿潮一代膨胀和中国过度融资的资本无所不在的时代，这不是问题。
- Like soy production in Argentina and the United States, the majority of Brazil’s soy production is deep inland. Unlike Argentina or the United States, Brazil lacks the flat-to-the-coast geography that enables a cheap rail-and-river transport system to ship out its agricultural bounty. Most of Brazil’s soy is moved by truck. That necessitates vast volumes of cheap, imported capital to fund the necessary infrastructure. In the capital-omnipresent era of the Boomer Bulge and Chinese hyperfinancing, this isn’t an issue.
- 所有农作物都会经历供过于求和需求不足的周期，但如果说 1990 年后的世界有一个共同点，那就是全球人口不断增加和富裕，这意味着他们需要更多更好的食物。这个更大更富裕的最大单一组成部分是对价格不敏感的中国。中国人最奢侈的食物是猪肉，中国的生猪存栏量比世界上其他国家的总和还要多，中国自己的耕地远远不够养猪，养猪最快的方法就是养猪大豆。不出所料，巴西大豆自 2000 年以来一直处于高位。
- All crops go through cycles of oversupply and underdemand, but if there is a commonality in the post-1990 world, it has been that the global population has consistently gotten bigger and richer, and that means it wants more and better foods. The biggest single component of this bigger-and-richer is price-insensitive China. The preferred luxury food of the Chinese is pork, the Chinese hog herd is larger than the rest of the world’s combined, China’s own farmland is woefully inadequate to the task of feeding it, and the fastest way to fatten up a pig is to feed it soy. Unsurprisingly, Brazilian soy has been on a tear since 2000.
除了大脑的基因工作外，所有这些因素都将打破巴西人在去全球化世界中的另一条路。这并不意味着巴西的农业产量会崩溃，但这确实意味着产量会萎缩，巴西的产量将远不可靠，巴西的产量将更具周期性，巴西人将以阿根廷人的方式与国内运输问题作斗争美国人根本无法理解。
With the exception of the genetic brain work, all these factors will break the other way for the Brazilians in a deglobalized world. That hardly means Brazilian agricultural output will collapse, but it does mean that output will shrink, that Brazil’s output will be far less reliable, that Brazil’s output will be far more cyclical, and that the Brazilians will struggle with internal transport issues in ways the Argentines and Americans simply cannot comprehend.
接下来是米饭。就国际贸易而言，大米“仅”在价值上排名第九，但这掩盖了它作为仅次于小麦的世界第二大最受欢迎谷物的重要性。问题在于有许多不同的品种，从意大利调味饭中使用的 Arborio 到印度美食中的印度香米，再到印度尼西亚的粘性，再到泰国的茉莉花，再到中国的黑色。亚洲人对米饭的看法与美国人对烧烤的看法相同。先有正道，后有恐怖。这种态度往往会减少交易量。
Next up is rice. In terms of international trade, rice is “only” ranked ninth by value, but that belies its importance as the world’s second-most-popular grain after wheat. At issue is that there are many different varieties, ranging from the Arborio used in risotto to the basmati of Indian cuisine to the sticky of Indonesia to the jasmine of Thailand to the black of China. The Asians think of rice the same way Americans think of barbecue. There’s a right way, and then there’s horror. The attitude tends to reduce the volume traded.
世界上所有的水稻品种远没有小麦那么传奇，这主要是因为水稻在很多方面与小麦截然相反。水稻是一种种植困难且成本高昂的作物，与人类消费的任何其他主要食物相比，它对投入、劳动力、机械和加工的要求更高。
The world’s collective rice varietals are not nearly as storied as wheat, largely because in many ways rice is wheat’s polar opposite. Rice is a difficult and expensive crop to grow, demanding more in inputs, labor, machinery, and processing than any of the other major foods that humanity consumes.
水稻对水和劳动力的要求很高，以至于它的种植深刻地塑造并阻碍了使用它的文化。小麦是一劳永逸的。好吧，如果您考虑脱粒，也许是两次完成。米？机会难得。这一切都与水资源管理有关。
Rice is demanding of both water and labor, to the point that its cultivation profoundly shapes—and hobbles—the cultures that use it. Wheat is a once-and-done. Well, maybe twice-and-done if you consider threshing. Rice? Fat chance. It is all about water management.
世界上几乎所有的水稻都不是行作物，而是在稻田中种植。稻田必须挖出并铺上粘土，以免漏水。稻田不是田地，而是更大的露天盆地。在一个单独的位置，水稻种子必须长成幼苗。在大多数情况下，这些秧苗是人工种植在被淹水的稻田中以促进早期生长，几天后将稻田排干水分，使幼苗能够呼吸、获得充足的阳光、建立根系并生长。
Nearly all the world’s rices are not row crops, but are instead grown in paddies. Rice paddies must be dug out and lined with clay so they don’t leak. Paddies are less fields and more gigantic open-air pots. In a separate location, rice seeds must be grown into seedlings. In most cases these seedlings are planted by hand into flooded paddies for early growth, and after a few days the paddies are drained to enable the young rice plants to breathe, get enough sunshine, establish root pegging, and grow.
然后开始水舞：田地反复被淹没以淹没陆生杂草和虫子，然后排干水以杀死水草和虫子。任何阶段的水过多都会淹没作物。太少会导致污垢结块干燥。根据品种的不同，在收获前的最后干燥之前，必须重复这种先淹水再排水的循环最多四次。收获后，稻秆必须再次晒干。稻米必须打两次— 一次是为了将谷粒从秸秆中分离出来，第二次是为了去除谷粒的外壳。那只是糙米。要获得白米，必须将谷物抛光以去除麸皮。
Then begins the water dance: fields are repeatedly flooded to drown out terrestrial weeds and bugs, and then drained to kill aquatic weeds and bugs. Too much water at any stage drowns the crop. Too little results in dirt-caked desiccation. Depending on cultivar, this flooding-then-draining cycle must be repeated up to four times before a final drying that precedes harvest. After harvest, the rice stalks must be dried again. Rice must be threshed twice—once to separate the grains from the stalks, and a second time to remove the husks from the grains. And that’s just for brown rice. To get white rice, the grains must be polished to remove the bran.
没有将一些种子扔在地上并在几个月后回来。种稻是一份近乎全职的工作。小麦大国打仗了，只要农民回来收割就好了。当一个稻米大国参战时，一年的饥饿就被纳入了决策过程。
There is no tossing some seeds on the ground and coming back in a few months. Rice farming is a near-full-time job. When a wheat power goes to war, so long as the farmers are back for harvest, all is good. When a rice power goes to war, a year of starvation is baked into the decision making.
考虑到有多少水稻品种，不同类型和地区之间存在大量差异也就不足为奇了。印度次大陆的季风气候有适合水稻生长的雨季和适合小麦生长的旱季（但水稻就是水稻，因此农民必须选择要准备什么土地）。日本倾向于使用机械育苗。在密西西比州，水稻是一种连续、大量和严格控制灌溉的中耕作物。加利福尼亚通过飞机种植水稻。
Considering how many rice varietals there are, it should come as little surprise that there’s a lot of variation type by type and region by region. The monsoonal climates of the Indian subcontinent have very wet seasons that are good for rice and very dry seasons that are good for wheat (but a paddy is a paddy and so farmers must choose what to prepare their lands for). Japan tends to use machinery to plant seedlings. In Mississippi, rice is a row crop under incessant, heavy, and heavily controlled irrigation. California plants its rice via airplane.
骑士团对稻米世界的改变远不及对小麦世界的改变。小麦随处生长，因此骑士团将其放逐到只有小麦才能生长的地方。但是水稻种植需要非常特殊的必须创造的条件，超低成本的劳动力，做很少的其他事情，以及大量的水，通常不止一个季节。不管教团对其他任何事物和其他地方做了什么，它并没有导致水稻种植方式，尤其是水稻种植地点的大规模动荡：水稻世界长期以来一直是一个相当封闭的新月形土地，从南亚到东南亚再到东亚. 这条弧线约占水稻总产量的 90%，几乎全部是水稻型。
The Order didn’t transform the world of rice nearly as much as it did the world of wheat. Wheat grows anywhere, so the Order banished it to places only wheat can grow. But rice cultivation requires very specific conditions that must be created, an ultra-low-cost labor force that does very little else, and lots of water, typically for more than one season. Regardless of what the Order did to everything and everywhere else, it did not result in a mass upheaval in the hows and especially the wheres of rice cultivation: RiceWorld has long been a fairly contained crescent of lands from South Asia through Southeast Asia into East Asia. This arc comprises roughly 90 percent of total rice production, nearly all of which is paddy-style.
展望未来，RiceWorld 面临两个挑战。
Looking forward, RiceWorld faces two challenges.
第一，便便。
First, poop.
除了日本、香港和新加坡，南亚、东南亚或东亚很少有地方在 1945 年之前实现工业化。因此，大多数水稻生产都使用人类和动物的粪便作为主要肥料。考虑到稻田工人整天都在粪水中涉水，你可以想象这对寿命的影响。*
With the notable exceptions of Japan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, very few spots in South, Southeast, or East Asia had industrialized before 1945. As such, most rice production used human and animal poop as its primary fertilizers. Considering that rice laborers were wading around in poop water all day, you can imagine the impact upon life spans.*
在中国，文化大革命的恐怖破坏了引进化肥的最早期进展，迫使中国农民重新开始使用便便。直到 19世纪90年代，便便才真正消失。再加上其他一些在收割和灌溉方面的工业技术，许多中国稻农终于享有足够的粮食安全，他们可以集体离开水田生活到城市。收入增加了。发病率骤降。寿命扩大了。
In China the horrors of the Cultural Revolution unwound most early progress in introducing fertilizer, forcing Chinese peasants to return to poop. It really wasn’t until the 1990s that poop really vanished as an input. Add in a few other industrial techs as regards harvesting and irrigation, and many Chinese ricers finally enjoyed sufficient food security that they could up and leave paddy life for the city en masse. Incomes rose. Disease rates plunged. Life spans expanded.
放松这个过程，拒绝进口输入，RiceWorld 将发现自己陷入严重的麻烦。
Unwind that process, deny access to imported inputs, and RiceWorld will find itself in serious trouble.
没有这些磷肥，稻米世界的任何地方都无法种植足够数量的水稻。数十年的大规模城市化已将粪便来源与稻田分开。这意味着要么 20 亿人需要放弃水稻，要么这些地区需要以比城市化更快的速度去城市化，这样“天然”肥料才能再次与水稻生产并置。
Without those phosphate fertilizers, rice cannot be grown in the necessary volume anywhere in RiceWorld. Decades of massive urbanization have separated the sources of poop from the paddies. That means either 2 billion people need to give up on rice, or these regions need to deurbanize far more quickly than they urbanized so “natural” fertilizer can once again be colocated with rice production.
在这一点上，中国有没事的可能。与东亚和东南亚的大部分地区不同，中国人可以在国内采购磷酸盐，但前提是中国保持完好无损。中国所有的磷酸盐矿都在其遥远的西部——特别是西藏和新疆，自 1950 年代以来，中共一直在这些地区进行不同程度和残酷的种族灭绝。这些地区恰好与该国人口稠密的汉族占多数的地区相距一千多英里，那里种植水稻。如果中国因任何原因崩溃，它获得合理水稻产量的唯一希望就是回到以粪便为动力的生活圈子。
On this point, China has the possibility of being okayish. Unlike the vast bulk of East and Southeast Asia, the Chinese can source phosphates internally, although only so long as China remains fully intact. All of China’s phosphate mines are in its far west—specifically Tibet and Xinjiang, regions where the CCP has been carrying out ethnic-based genocides with various degrees of intensity and brutality since the 1950s. Such regions also happen to be a thousand-plus miles of nothing from the country’s densely populated Han-supermajority regions, where the rice is grown. Should China crack for any reason, its only hope for reasonable rice yields is to shift back to a poop-powered circle of life.
这种大规模搬迁对制造能力的连锁反应应该是显而易见的。劳动力只会在错误的地方做一些与小部件制作无关的事情。对稻米产量的连锁反应不太明显。中国飞速的城市化意味着人口老龄化速度如此之快，以至于一开始就没有多少坚强的后盾可以搬迁到农场。人口规模的连锁反应简直是可怕的。1980 年至 2020 年间，中国几乎所有的人口增长（约 5 亿人）都来自延长寿命的健康增长，而不是新生儿出生。这意味着如果中国需要从合成肥料转向更多的东西。. . 自然地，这个国家的寿命增加——该国过去四十年的人口增长——即使没有其他问题，也将在短短几十年内消失。
The knock-on effects of such mass relocations for manufacturing capacity should be obvious. The labor will simply be in the wrong place, doing something unrelated to widget making. The knock-on effects for rice output are somewhat less obvious. China’s breakneck urbanization means its population has aged so quickly that there are not a lot of strong backs to relocate to the farms in the first place. And the knock-on effects for population size are simply terrifying. Nearly all population gains in China that occurred between 1980 and 2020—roughly 500 million people—are from health gains extending life spans, not from new births. This means that should China need to switch away from synthetic fertilizers to something more . . . natural, the country’s life span gains—the country’s last forty years of population increases—will be lost in just a couple of decades even if nothing else goes wrong.
RiceWorld 面临的第二个挑战不那么严重，但问题可能更大：水的获取。
The second challenge to RiceWorld is less gross, but perhaps even more problematic: water access.
水稻挑剔、耗水的特性意味着，与小麦不同，水稻不能在贫瘠的土地上种植。这种挑剔使得水稻极易受到气候变化的影响。改变一个地区的水文，哪怕是一点点，以及水稻产量。
Rice’s finicky, water-intensive nature means that, unlike with wheat, there is no growing of rice on marginal land. This finickiness makes rice incredibly vulnerable to climatic shifts. Change a region’s hydrology, even a little, and rice output tanks.
中国最多产的水稻产区位于长江下游沿岸，这里是 10千年前水稻首次被驯化的地区。随着中国城市化，沿江城市不断扩张，吸纳了过去的水田。剩下的水稻生产是几乎完全依赖灌溉的高地地区。这使得长江米取决于长江流域上游无数气候带的降雨——其中许多正在沙漠化。中国南方——另一个水稻大区——湿润得多，但由于其崎岖不平，也充满了小气候。即使该地区的总降雨量没有变化，也会出现干湿交替的情况，从而导致水量不足或位置不当。通常，微气候的微小差异不会引起我的注意。但是中国有14亿人，大米挑剔。
China’s most prolific rice production is located along the lower Yangtze, the zone where rice was first domesticated ten millennia ago. As China urbanized, cities along the river expanded, absorbing what used to be paddy-rice territory. What’s left for rice production are upland territories that rely nearly exclusively upon irrigation. That makes Yangtze rice dependent upon rainfall in myriad climate zones of the upper Yangtze basin—many of which are desertifying. Southern China—another big rice region—is far wetter, but also packed with microclimates due to its ruggedness. Even if the overall amount of rainfall in the area doesn’t change, pockets of wet and dry will emerge, leading to pockets of insufficient or malplaced water. Normally, small differences in microclimes wouldn’t justify my attention. But there are 1.4 billion people in China and rice is so very finicky.
中国具体面临的水问题实际上只是更广泛的气候变化问题的一个缩影，这是一个更大的话题。
The water issues facing China specifically are really just a microcosm of the broader issues of climate change, and that is a far bigger topic.
农业与气候变化
Agriculture and Climate Change
让我们从一些令人费解的事实开始本节。
Let’s start this section with a few squirmworthy facts.
首先，和平对地球极其不利。当美国人制定他们的秩序时，他们并没有简单地建立一个联盟来对抗苏联。这一战略决策还使广大人类开始走上工业化之路，随着大多数人开始大量使用煤炭、石油和天然气，温室气体排放量激增。
First, peace is exceedingly bad for the planet. When the Americans crafted their Order, they didn’t simply create an alliance to fight the Soviets. That strategic decision also enabled the vast mass of humanity to start down the road toward industrialization, generating an explosion in greenhouse gas emissions as most of humanity started using coal, oil, and natural gas en masse.
第二，冷战后秩序的扩张，嗯，每个人，加速排放增加。当世界主要工业化体系包括法国、德国、日本、韩国和台湾时，情况已经够糟了。当印度尼西亚、印度、尼日利亚和中国加入俱乐部时，情况就完全不同了。二战前甚至没有考虑开始工业化进程的国家现在要为当前排放量的一半以上负责，总排放量是 1945 年的七倍。
Second, the post–Cold War expansion of the Order to, well, everyone, accelerated emissions increases. It was bad enough when the world’s major industrialized systems included France and Germany and Japan and Korea and Taiwan. It was quite another when Indonesia and India and Nigeria and China joined the club. Countries that couldn’t even consider beginning the industrialization process before World War II are now responsible for more than half of current emissions, with total emissions seven times what they were in 1945.
第三，既然大多数人都经历过电这样的事情，考虑到即使全球化崩溃，人们也不会自觉地选择回到工业化前的生活方式。现代环保运动经常忽略的一点是，石油和天然气不仅是世界上的低碳化石燃料，而且还是国际贸易的燃料。在后全球化世界中，大多数国家可以在当地采购的主要燃料是煤炭。不仅是任何煤，还有低热量、低温燃烧、高污染的软煤或褐煤，它们产生的碳排放量远高于燃烧。. . 几乎任何其他东西。作为一个物种，我们完全有能力退化到一个支离破碎、黑暗、贫穷、饥饿的世界，同时仍然增加温室气体排放。
Third, now that most of humanity has experienced things like electricity, it bears consideration that people will not consciously choose to go back to a preindustrial lifestyle, even if globalization collapses. Something the modern environmental movement often misses is that oil and natural gas are not only the world’s low-carbon fossil fuels, they are also the fuels that are internationally traded. In a post-globalized world, the primary fuel most countries can source locally is coal. And not just any coal, but low-caloric, low-temperature burning, high-contaminant soft or brown coal that generates far more carbon emissions than burning . . . almost anything else. We are completely capable as a species of devolving into a fractured, dark, poor, hungry world while still increasing greenhouse gas emissions.
第四，我们预测气候影响的能力往往低得令人尴尬。
Fourth, our capacity to forecast climate impacts tends to be embarrassingly off.
最近最好的例子是 2021 年年中的美国。一个高压系统锁定了太平洋西北部上空的一些暖空气。然后，其中一些空气从瀑布中下降，引发压缩效应。结果？通常多云、多雨、肮脏的地方在数周内变成了敞开的烤箱。俄勒冈州波特兰的气温多次超过 120 度。我见过许多气候模型表明沙漠或美国南部更热是不可避免的，但没有人预测波特兰——该死的波特兰——最终会比拉斯维加斯更热。
The best recent example is the United States in mid-2021. A high-pressure system locked some warm air over the Pacific Northwest. Some of that air then descended from the Cascades, triggering compression effects. The result? Normally cloudy, rainy, grungy locales mutated into open ovens for weeks. Portland, Oregon, repeatedly clocked temperatures above 120 degrees. I’ve seen many climate models that suggest the inevitability of hotter deserts or a hotter American South, but none have projected that Portland—freakin’ Portland—would end up being hotter than Las Vegas has ever been.
造成这种基本失误的原因很简单：我们目前没有足够好的数据来将气候变化预测到邮政编码级别。任何尝试的人最多只能做出有根据的猜测。
The reason for such a fundamental miss is simple: we do not at present have good enough data to project climate change down to the zip code level. Anyone who tries is at most making an educated guess.
我不喜欢猜测。只要有可能，我就不会。所以我不看很多气候预报，而是转向天气数据。不是当前或未来的天气数据——过去的数据。天气记录基于全球数十万个报告地点，每天拍摄数十次，可以追溯到一个多世纪以前。数据没有争议。这不是政治性的。这不是投影。而如果有变化趋势线，就知道针已经动了，只需要顺着它往前走一点就可以了。
I don’t like guessing. Whenever possible, I don’t. So I don’t look at many climate forecasts, but instead turn to weather data. Not current or future weather data—past data. The weather record is based on hundreds of thousands of reporting locations the world over, taken dozens of times a day, stretching back well over a century. The data isn’t controversial. It isn’t political. It isn’t a projection. And if there is a trend line of change, you know that the needle has moved already, and you just need to follow it forward a bit.
出于这个项目的目的，我使用 120 年的天气数据趋势线来预测仅仅再增加 30 年。觉得这不是很性感？再想一想。
For purposes of this project, I’m using 120-year weather data trend lines to project forward a mere thirty additional years. Think that’s not very sexy? Think again.
两地的故事
A TALE OF TWO LANDS
考虑两个非常真实的例子，涉及两个我们拥有出色数据的第一世界地区：西南太平洋国家澳大利亚（具体来说，该国东南三分之一，大部分人口居住在那里，大部分农业产出都在这里生产）和美国中西部的伊利诺伊州。
Consider two very real-world examples involving two first-world regions for which we have excellent data: the southwest Pacific country of Australia (specifically, the country’s southeastern third, where most of its people live and most of its agricultural output is produced) and the American midwestern state of Illinois.
平均而言，自 1900 年以来，这两个地方的温度都上升了 1.1 摄氏度。我们也再次从真实世界的硬数据中了解到，温度升高对这两个地方造成了什么影响。影响甚至远远不匹配。
On average, temperatures in both places have risen 1.1 degree Celsius since 1900. We also have—again, from hard real-world data—a solid idea of what this temperature increase hath wrought in both places. The impacts don’t even remotely match up.
澳大利亚的高温表现为更炎热、更干燥的夏季。2019-20 年夏天，澳大利亚经历了一场干旱，伴随着世界末日边缘的丛林大火，烧毁了该国五分之一的森林，杀死了大约 10 亿只动物，并摧毁了该国大约七分之一的牧场。相比之下，在伊利诺伊州，较高的温度表现为水分增加，2019 年和 2020 年的夏季也不例外。伊利诺伊州没有发生火灾，而是经历了玉米和大豆产量的增加。
Higher temperatures in Australia have manifested as hotter, drier summer days. In the summer of 2019–20 Australia experienced a drought, complete with borderline apocalyptic bush fires that burned down one-fifth of the country’s forests, killing something like a billion animals and destroying roughly one-seventh of the country’s rangelands. In contrast, in Illinois, higher temperatures have manifested as increased moisture, with the summers of 2019 and 2020 being no exceptions. Instead of fires, Illinois has experienced incrementally higher corn and soy output.
为什么会有如此明显的差异？一句话：地理。
Why such stark differences? In a word: geography.
十几个主要洋流的漩涡环绕着澳大利亚大陆。有些温暖。有些冷。一些季节性的。澳大利亚的远北地区稳固地处于热带地区。远东南边缘进入温带寒冷的一侧。结果是对比鲜明的土地。不仅澳大利亚大陆的中部四分之三是坚硬的沙漠，而且季节与季节、年复一年的恶劣气候变化以参差不齐的洪水和干旱模式诅咒着澳大利亚。就好像澳大利亚的大沙漠像心脏一样跳动，每隔几年就会有降水模式流入和流出内陆。澳大利亚人用他们用词的那种绝妙方式称这些阶段为“大湿”和“大干”。早在 1990 年后地球大气层中碳加速积累之前，这种模式就有了很好的记录，甚至在澳大利亚开始工业化之前。这不是气候变化。这是澳大利亚。
A swirl of a dozen major ocean currents surrounds the Australian continent. Some warm. Some cold. Some seasonal. Australia’s far north is firmly in the tropics. The far southeast edges into the cold side of the temperate zone. The result is a land of contrasts. Not only is the middle three-quarters of the Australian continent hard desert, but wild climatic variations from season to season and year to year curse Australia with a jagged flood-and-drought pattern. It is as if the great Australian deserts pulse like a heart, with precipitation patterns surging into and away from the interior every few years. The Aussies, in that wonderful way they have with words, call these phases the Big Wet and the Big Dry. Such patterns were well documented long before the accelerating carbon builds in Earth’s atmosphere of the post-1990 world, or even before the Aussies began industrializing. This isn’t climate change. This is Australia.
现在加上 1.1 摄氏度的温度升高。澳大利亚的地形布局使其干旱。干燥的空气升温快，但降温也快。因此，澳大利亚的大部分温度升高都表现为白天温度升高。这提高了露点，使下雨的可能性降低。这使该国变得干燥，使其成为干旱和火灾频发的地区，从而降低了农业潜力。澳大利亚的许多农业区——最著名的是该国东部蓝山的西坡，以及东南部墨累-达令盆地的重要部分——可能会退化为沙尘暴。2019-20 年的火灾对他们来说有一种非常预示着世界末日的感觉。
Now add in that 1.1-degree Celsius temperature increase. Australia’s topographical layout makes it arid. Dry air heats quickly, but also cools quickly. Most of Australia’s temperature increase, therefore, manifests as higher daytime temperatures. That raises the dew point, making rain less likely. This dries the country out and makes it drought- and fire-prone, decreasing agricultural potential. Many of Australia’s agricultural regions—most notably the western slopes of the Blue Mountains in the country’s east, and significant portions of the Murray-Darling Basin in the southeast—are likely to degrade into dust bowls. The fires of 2019–20 have a very harbinger-of-the-Apocalypse feel to them.
将此与伊利诺伊州的地理环境进行比较。伊利诺伊州位于大陆内部深处，因此可以近乎发条地体验完整的四个季节规律性。伊利诺斯州地处温带中部，每个月的降水量都相当稳定，最干燥的月份（2 月）的降水量很少低于两英寸，而最潮湿的月份（5 月）的降水量很少超过 5 英寸。
Compare this to the Illinoisan geography. Illinois is deep in the continental interior, and so experiences the full four seasons with near-clockwork regularity. Illinois is smack dab in the middle of the temperate zone and receives fairly consistent precipitation month to month, with the driest month (February) rarely receiving less than two inches of water, while the wettest month (May) rarely receives more than five inches.
部分降雨始于墨西哥湾的热带天气系统。我们再次从现实世界的温度测量中知道，海湾上空的空气几十年来一直在稳步变暖。温暖的空气可以携带更多的水分，使伊利诺伊州更有可能从热带风暴系统中获得降雨，但伊利诺伊州深厚的大陆性意味着它经历这些风暴只是简单的降雨，而不是移动房屋搬迁的飓风。与 20 世纪上半叶相比，额外的水分（根据您所在州的位置每年增加 3 到 9 英寸）意味着伊利诺伊州的农业产量越来越大。
Some of that rain begins as tropical weather systems in the Gulf of Mexico. We know—again, from real-world temperature measurements—that the air above the Gulf has been steadily warming for decades. Warmer air can carry more moisture, making Illinois more likely to receive rainfall from tropical storm systems, but Illinois’s deeply continental nature means it experiences these storms as simple rainfall, rather than mobile-home-relocating hurricanes. The extra moisture as compared to the first half of the twentieth century, somewhere between three and nine inches a year based on where in the state you are, means Illinoisan agriculture is bursting at the seams with greater and greater output.
但是那些温度升高呢？到目前为止，他们一直是。. . 积极的。伊利诺伊州的地形布局使其潮湿。较湿的空气加热得更慢并且保持热量的时间更长。因此，伊利诺伊州的大部分温度升高都表现为较高的夜间温度。这减少了对作物造成破坏的霜冻的夜晚数量，增加了农业潜力。如果变暖趋势持续下去，在 2020 年代的某个时候，伊利诺伊州的大部分地区将经历如此多的无霜夜，农民将能够一年种植两种作物。
But what about those temperature increases? So far they have been a . . . positive. Illinois’s topographic layout makes it humid. Wetter air heats more slowly and holds its heat longer. Most of Illinois’s temperature increase, therefore, manifests as higher nighttime temperatures. That reduces the number of nights with crop-damaging frosts, increasing agricultural potential. If warming trends hold, at some point in the 2020s most of Illinois will experience so many frost-free nights that farmers will be able to plant two crops a year.
关于气候变化的传统智慧断言，澳大利亚的困境是显而易见的、可预测的，因此是可以避免的。但在谈到伊利诺伊州时，现实已经彻底颠覆了传统智慧。不同的地理位置会导致不同的气候结果，即使净能源增长相同。它扩展了思维，想出了澳大利亚演变的积极方面，同样也扩展了思维，想出了伊利诺伊州演变的消极方面。
The conventional wisdom on climate change asserts that Australia’s predicament is obvious, predictable, and therefore avoidable. But reality has sucker-punched the conventional wisdom when it comes to Illinois. Different geographies result in different climatic outcomes, even when the net energy increase is identical. It stretches the mind to come up with a positive aspect of the Australian evolutions, and it equally stretches the mind to come up with a negative aspect of the evolution in Illinois.
这种脱节正是关键所在。
That disconnect is precisely the point.
虽然我们不能独立于天气数据做出具体的、局部的预测，但我们可以使用天气数据做出一些比粗略的陈述稍微多一点的陈述，这些陈述对我的口味来说已经足够戏剧化了。所有这些都影响着农业世界。
While we cannot make specific, localized predictions independent of weather data, we can use weather data to make some slightly more than broad-stroke statements that are more than dramatic enough for my taste. All impact the world of agriculture.
了解气候变化，第 I 部分：不是热，而是湿度
MAKING SENSE OF CLIMATE CHANGE, PART I: IT’S NOT THE HEAT, IT’S THE HUMIDITY
第一个更广泛的步骤涉及基础化学：虽然较暖的空气可以容纳更多的水，但较暖的空气也意味着需要更多的水分才能产生降水。在低湿度地区，较热的空气通常意味着降雨量较少（澳大利亚），但在高湿度地区通常意味着降雨量较多（伊利诺伊州）。这在极端情况下产生了最大的差异。大多数沙漠将变得更热、更干燥（和更大），大多数已经干旱的地区面临荒漠化的风险，而热带地区降雨量的增加将使平坦地区变成湿地。沙漠和湿地是种植粮食的垃圾。
The first more-than-broad stroke involves basic chemistry: while warmer air can hold more water, warmer air also means more moisture is required to generate precipitation. In low-humidity areas, hotter air will typically mean less rainfall (Australia), but in high-humidity areas it will typically mean more rainfall (Illinois). This makes the most difference on the extremes. Most deserts will get hotter and drier (and bigger), most already-arid zones risk desertification, and increased rainfall in the tropics will turn flatter zones into wetlands. Deserts and wetlands are rubbish for growing food.
只有几度的温差只会改变几个百分点的湿度模式。这似乎并不多。这并不多。但请记住，我们也在应对一个运输和供应链将被削弱，或在某些地方完全断裂的世界。在那种环境下，只要给农业系统增加一点压力，就会产生巨大的影响。命中列表并不令人鼓舞。可能受到第一个因素的气候变化影响最大的地区包括：
A temperature difference of only a few degrees will change humidity patterns by only a few percentage points. That doesn’t seem like much. It isn’t much. But remember, we’re also dealing with a world in which transport and supply chains will be weakening, or in some places breaking completely. Adding just a bit more stress to agricultural systems in that environment will have outsized effects. The hit list isn’t an encouraging one. The regions likely to feel the biggest brunt of climatic shifts from this first factor include:
- 马托格罗索州，巴西的大豆中心，世界上最密集的大豆产区。
- Mato Grosso, Brazil’s Soy Central, the world’s densest soy production zone.
- 黎凡特、萨赫勒和中美洲，已经是世界上粮食最不安全的地区。
- The Levant, the Sahel, and Central America, already the world’s most food-insecure regions.
- 乌克兰南部，可以说是俄罗斯小麦带产量最高的部分。
- Southern Ukraine, arguably the most productive part of the Russian wheat belt.
- 加利福尼亚州的中央谷地，以美元计算是地球上生产力最高的农业区。
- California’s Central Valley, in dollar terms the most productive agricultural zone on the planet.
- 恒河盆地是世界上人口最稠密的河流系统，居住着大约 5 亿人。
- The Ganges Basin, the world’s most densely populated river system, home to some half a billion people.
- 阿根廷的门多萨葡萄酒产区，真正的身体愉悦来自于此。
- Argentina’s Mendoza wine region, where actual physical joy comes from.
了解气候变化，第二部分：观察那些风
MAKING SENSE OF CLIMATE CHANGE, PART II: WATCH THOSE WINDS
第二个更广泛的冲击是世界正在不均匀地变暖，两极的加热速度大约是热带地区的三倍。温差产生风，温差越大，风越多。这是好是坏取决于地球在你和赤道之间的样子。如果有一大片热带水域，预计强风会给你带来更多的雨水。更多的雨。
The second more-than-broad stroke is that the world is warming unevenly, with the poles heating at roughly triple the rate of the tropics. Temperature differentiation generates wind, and greater temperature differentiation generates more wind. Whether this is good, bad, or otherwise depends upon what the Earth looks like between you and the equator. If there’s a big body of tropical water, expect the stronger winds to bring you more rain. A lot more rain.
日本、台湾、韩国、墨西哥和中国应该为更多降雨做好准备。在所有这六个案例中，水资源管理都可能成为一个问题，因为所有这些案例都在可能会经历额外水分的区域中遭遇极其崎岖的地形。日本、台湾和韩国是高度发达的国家，已经拥有强大的水资源管理系统，可能会享受到类似伊利诺伊州式的输出冲击。
Japan, Taiwan, the Koreas, Mexico, and China should brace for more rainfall. In all six cases, water management is likely to prove a problem because all suffer from extremely rugged topographies in the zones likely to experience additional moisture. Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea are highly developed countries that already boast robust water management systems and might enjoy something a bit like an Illinois-style output kick.
墨西哥、中国和朝鲜不太可能如此幸运。墨西哥的西南海岸不会像湿透的那样湿漉漉的，但墨西哥的大部分地区崎岖不平，海拔很高。农业的任何收益都可能与泥石流造成的破坏相匹配。中国南方是中国可能获得最多额外温暖和水的地区，已经是该国最温暖和最潮湿的地区。更有可能出现那种类型的暴洪和挥之不去的湿地，这将使该地区的水稻种植工作超载，从而减少而不是增加收成。朝鲜已经遭受了经常性的灾难性洪水。1990 年代的最后一批粮食导致近 200 万人死于饥荒。
Mexico, China, and North Korea are unlikely to be so fortunate. Mexico’s southwest coast isn’t going to get so much spritzed as drenched, but most of Mexico is rugged and high-altitude. Any gain to agriculture will likely be matched by destruction via mudslide. Southern China, the part of the country likely to get the most additional warmth and water, is already the country’s warmest and wettest area. It is more likely to see torrential floods and lingering wetlands of the type that will overload the region’s rice-growing efforts, reducing rather than increasing harvests. North Korea already suffers from regular catastrophic flooding. The last batch in the 1990s contributed to the famine-induced death of nearly 2 million people.
不断变化的降雨模式会影响水流，尤其是当这些水流已经受到人类活动的影响时。在世界主要河流中，近年来流量和流量变化最大的是东南亚的湄公河。中国人利用它的上游来灌溉青藏高原的田地，老挝人和泰国人疯狂地修建水坝来发电水电，柬埔寨人将他们的文明集中在湄公河与季节性洪水泛滥的低地的交汇处，而越南人则将整个湄公河三角洲变成了一个巨大的稻田。三角洲是河流与海洋交汇的地方，你可以看到这个问题。即使是略微降低的河流流量也会导致陆地稍微下沉和海水向内陆推进。即使是海平面或陆地平面的微小变化也意味着湄公河三角洲的大片地区将暴露在海水中，并且。. . 没有水稻会生长。超过 1 亿人的食物供应依赖三角洲。
Changing rainfall patterns impact water flows, especially when those water flows have already been impinged upon by human activity. Among the world’s major rivers, the one that has seen the greatest changes to its volume and flows in recent years is the Mekong, in Southeast Asia. The Chinese have tapped its upper reaches to irrigate fields on the Tibetan Plateau, the Laotians and Thais are building dams like mad to generate hydropower, the Cambodians have centered their civilization on the intersection of the Mekong and their seasonally flooded lowlands, while the Vietnamese have turned the Mekong’s entire delta into one gigantic rice paddy. Deltas being where rivers meet ocean, you can see the problem. Even marginally lower river flows lead to both the land sinking a bit and the sea pushing inland. Even a minor shift in sea or land levels means vast swaths of the Mekong Delta will become exposed to seawater, and . . . no rice will grow. More than 100 million people depend upon the delta for their food supply.
我还担心印度次大陆，这是一个人口众多的地区，其靠近赤道的位置会产生不同类型的风力条件。印度洋气温上升意味着海洋和陆地之间的温差正在缩小。温度变化较小意味着风力减弱，这意味着已有百年历史且有据可查的季风减弱将继续存在。这种减弱已经使次大陆的降雨量在上个世纪减少了 10-20%。
I’m also worried about the Indian subcontinent, a region with boatloads of people and whose near-equatorial location will generate a different sort of wind condition. Rising temperatures in the Indian Ocean mean the temperature differential between sea and land is shrinking. Less temperature variation means less intense winds, which means that the century-old and very well documented weakening of the monsoonal winds will continue. This weakening has already reduced rainfall on the subcontinent by 10–20 percent over the last century.
通常情况下，在很长一段时间内，如此有限的数字不会让我感到困扰。绿色革命的技术与教团的材料获取相结合，已经远远超过了补偿。但这些技术和材料在未来将无法可靠地获得。更令人担忧的是，印度三分之一的人口已经生活在半干旱地区，而印度人口在上个世纪翻了两番，按人均计算已成为世界上最缺水的国家。较弱的季风意味着印度教地带的降雨量减少以及喜马拉雅山脉南部积雪量减少。最后一点对巴基斯坦来说尤其是个坏消息，它依靠喜马拉雅融雪来灌溉一切。在次大陆上与巴基斯坦相对的是孟加拉国，这个国家是恒河三角洲。恒河外流变弱表明，整个孟加拉国约有 1.6 亿人口，可能会遭受类似于湄公河三角洲的命运。在世界的这一地区，没有多少犯错的余地。. . 特别是因为少雨意味着少米。
Normally such a limited figure over a lengthy time frame wouldn’t overbother me. The technologies of the Green Revolution combined with the materials access of the Order have more than compensated. But those techs and materials will not be as reliably available in the future. Of even greater concern, one-third of India’s population already lives in semiarid regions, while India’s population has quadrupled during the past century, making it already the world’s most water-poor country in per capita terms. Weaker monsoons mean less rainfall in the Hindu Belt as well as less snowpack in the southern Himalayas. That last bit is particularly bad news for Pakistan, which relies upon Himalayan snowmelt to irrigate everything. Opposite Pakistan on the subcontinent is Bangladesh, a country that is the Ganges Delta. Weaker outflows from the Ganges suggest the entire country of Bangladesh, some 160 million people, could suffer a fate akin to the Mekong Delta. There isn’t a lot of margin for error in this part of the world . . . especially since less rain means less rice.
地中海不够大，也不够热带，不足以产生水分效应。相反，更强的赤道-极地风模式已经出现将北欧的一些降雨锋面推向大海。从法国东部一直到乌克兰西部，北欧六年来一直在一点一点地变干。根据命令，这不是问题。欧洲只是简单地转向生产特色产品，然后以高价出售给一个富裕、相互联系的世界。目前尚不清楚欧洲大陆是否可以倒退，即使成功了，由于欧洲人偏爱当地需求，这样做也会从市场上撤走大量食品。*
The Mediterranean isn’t nearly big or tropical enough to generate the moisture effect. Instead, stronger equator-polar wind patterns are already pushing some of Northern Europe’s rain-generating fronts out to sea. From eastern France all the way to western Ukraine, Northern Europe has been drying out bit by bit for six decades. Under the Order this hasn’t been a problem. Europe simply shifted to producing specialty products that it then sells at top dollar to a wealthy, interconnected world. It is unclear whether the Continent can shift back, and even if it succeeds, doing so would remove a lot of food products from the market as the Europeans preference local needs.*
俄罗斯小麦带东部四分之三位于内陆沙漠以北。更强的赤道-极地风流将使俄罗斯小麦带东半部脱水，尤其是哈萨克斯坦北部的部分。更糟糕的是，任何风力驱动的干燥都会加剧一场完全不同的正在进行的气候灾难：
The eastern three-quarters of the Russian wheat belt is north of interior continental deserts. Stronger equatorial-polar wind currents will dehydrate the eastern half of the Russian wheat belt, particularly the portion in northern Kazakhstan. Even worse, any wind-driven drying will intensify a completely different in-progress climate disaster:
苏联将阿姆河和锡尔河系统的水域改道用于灌溉中亚沙漠的棉田，这一努力几乎摧毁了该地区主要湿度来源咸海。即使没有气候变化引起的温度升高，该地区持续的干旱也将在几十年内消除西天山和西帕米尔山脉的积雪。没有积雪，没有地区河流，整个地区都变成了硬沙漠。这意味着土库曼斯坦、乌兹别克斯坦、塔吉克斯坦、吉尔吉斯斯坦、哈萨克斯坦南部和阿富汗北部几乎所有农业的终结。就像在农业完全依赖灌溉的任何沙漠地区一样，当水消失时，食物也会消失。还有人民。
The Soviet Union diverted the waters of the Amu and Syr Darya river systems to irrigate cotton fields in the Central Asian deserts, an effort that has all but destroyed the Aral Sea, the region’s primary source of humidity. Even without climate-change-induced temperature increases, the region’s ongoing desiccation was already going to eliminate the snowpack of the western Tian Shan and western Pamir Mountains within a couple of decades. No snowpack, no regional rivers, and the entire region reverts to hard desert. That spells the end of nearly all agriculture in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, southern Kazakhstan, and northern Afghanistan. As in any desert location where agriculture is fully irrigation-dependent, when the water goes away, so too does the food. And the people.
这些风向模式转变无疑是美国中西部的赢家。正是这种赤道-极地现象至少在一定程度上解释了为什么伊利诺伊州在气候方面度过了如此美好的时光更改为最新。如果你在爱荷华州或印第安纳州，那就太好了，如果你在墨西哥湾沿岸，那就更不妙了，那里飓风是一个非常真实的、每年的威胁。
The hands-down winner of these shifts in wind patterns is the American Midwest. It is this equatorial-polar phenomenon that is at least in part responsible for why Illinois is having such a good time at climate change to date. That’s wonderful if you’re in Iowa or Indiana, less so if you’re on the Gulf Coast, where hurricanes are a very real, annual threat.
了解气候变化，第三部分：两个比一个好
MAKING SENSE OF CLIMATE CHANGE, PART III: TWO IS BETTER THAN ONE
降雨的两个来源，即。美国中西部农业之所以如此可靠，部分原因在于它不仅从墨西哥湾的季风系统中获得降雨，而且还从北美自西向东的急流中获得降雨。两种水分系统无法在同一年交付的情况极为罕见。
Two sources of rainfall, that is. Part of what makes American midwestern agriculture so reliable is that it receives rainfall not only from the monsoonal systems coming off the Gulf of Mexico, but also from North America’s west-to-east jet stream. It is exceedingly rare for both moisture systems to fail to deliver in the same year.
然而，对美国中西部普遍适用的情况并不适用于整个美国。通常，主导美国大部分天气模式的西向东急流会在大约 100 度经线处压倒热带风暴流，阻止它们继续向西移动。
What is true for the American Midwest in general, however, is not true for all of America. As a rule, the west-to-east jet stream, which dominates most of the United States’ weather patterns, overpowers tropical storm flows at roughly the 100th meridian, preventing them from proceeding any farther west.
在我们正在走向的气候变化越来越大的世界中，这条线以东的任何地方都可能经历更多的降水。然而，西部的任何地方都已经干燥，而且现在会更加干燥。大多数大平原农业社区都依赖灌溉，沿河谷聚集，这得益于落基山脉东部季节性强降雪。. . 未来降雪的次数可能会减少，强度也会降低，并且融化速度会更快。
In the increasingly climate-shifted world we are edging toward, anything east of that line is likely to experience more precipitation. Anything west, however, was already dry and will now be even drier. Most Great Plains agricultural communities are irrigation-dependent, clustered along river valleys made possible by highly seasonal snowfall in the eastern Rockies . . . snowfall that in the future is likely to arrive less often, less intensely, and to melt off much more quickly.
但很可能是什么。. . 美国大平原的悲伤将在主要受季风影响的印度、巴西、澳大利亚或东南亚，或主要受急流驱动的前苏联或撒哈拉以南非洲地区毁灭。
But what is likely to be . . . sad in the American Great Plains will be crushing in India or Brazil or Australia or Southeast Asia, which are all primarily monsoonal, or the former Soviet Union or sub-Saharan Africa, which are primarily jet stream driven.
事实上，除了美国中西部，世界上只有三个地方同时受益于急流和季风水分系统：法国、阿根廷和新西兰——都是农业强国。没有人会在采购投入方面经历太糟糕的时间，无论是以设备还是石油的形式。更好的是，没有人可能会遇到任何可能危及一般生活或特定农业生产的有意义的安全威胁。由于不断变化的地缘政治和气候规范，所有国家的产量都可能大幅增加。
In fact, aside from the American Midwest, only three places in the world benefit from both jet stream and monsoonal moisture systems: France, Argentina, and New Zealand—agricultural powerhouses all. None are likely to experience too awful a time sourcing inputs, whether in the form of equipment or oil. Better yet, none are likely to experience any meaningful security threats that might compromise life in general or agricultural production in specific. All are likely to see significant output increases due to a mix of shifting geopolitical and climatic norms.
但这些增长远远不足以养活 80 亿人。
But those increases will be nowhere near enough to feed 8 billion people.
那是在考虑第四次也是最后一次超宽行程之前。
And that’s before taking into account the fourth and final more-than-broad stroke.
了解气候变化，第四部分：边缘的尽头
MAKING SENSE OF CLIMATE CHANGE, PART IV: THE END OF THE MARGINS
农业能力受到最大影响的地区将是那些已经处于边缘的地区：干旱但不是沙漠，炎热潮湿但仍然可用。在干燥的地方比在潮湿的地方更容易感觉到疼痛，原因很简单，就能源和基础设施而言，排干过度潮湿的地区比向过度干燥的地区供水要容易得多。
The areas that will suffer the greatest impact on agricultural capacity will be those that were already marginal: arid but not desert, hot and wet but still serviceable. The pain will be felt more acutely in the dry locations rather than the wet ones for the simple reason that it is far easier in terms of energy and infrastructure to drain overly wet regions than to provide water to overly dry ones.
这些边缘土地面临着双重打击。工业技术使这些边缘土地变绿，而秩序首先使工业技术能够到达这些边缘土地中的许多。任何缺乏大规模灌溉所需的河流或含水层通道的地区——大多数地区都是如此——都面临着生产面积的急剧减少以及每英亩农业产量的灾难性减少。
Such marginal lands face a double blow. It took industrial technologies to turn these marginal lands green, and it took the Order to enable the industrial technologies to reach many of these marginal lands in the first place. Any of these locales that lack the river or aquifer access required for mass irrigation—and that is most of them—face stark reductions in productive acres as well as catastrophic reductions in agricultural output per acre of what’s left.
不幸的是，这代表了地球表面的巨大比例，包括农业强国，从玻利维亚到巴西到巴拉圭到意大利到西班牙到葡萄牙到阿尔及利亚到尼日利亚到刚果到巴基斯坦到印度到泰国到中国到越南到印度尼西亚到澳大利亚到墨西哥到南非。保守地说，这给养活约 40亿人的农业生产区增加了气候挑战。
This, unfortunately, represents a ginormous proportion of the Earth’s surface, including agricultural powerhouses ranging from Bolivia to Brazil to Paraguay to Italy to Spain to Portugal to Algeria to Nigeria to Congo to Pakistan to India to Thailand to China to Vietnam to Indonesia to Australia to Mexico to South Africa. Conservatively, that adds climatic challenges to the agricultural production zones feeding some 4 billion people.
这让我们回到小麦。今天的小麦主要种植在贫瘠的土地上，特别是在贫瘠的土地上，因为这些土地已经太干了，无法种植任何其他作物。那里的关键词是“干燥”。中的一个我们在过去三十年中发现的事情是，大多数植物就像大多数人一样：只要它们能够接触到更多的水，它们就相当耐高温。水和热之间的这种平衡是农业的一切。怀俄明州东部和蒙大拿州东部的降水情况相同，但怀俄明州稍微暖和一些，因此无法种植任何东西，而蒙大拿州则稳稳地位于小麦带。通过充足的灌溉，热应激是相当容易控制的。但如果今天的小麦产区有更多的水，他们就会种植比小麦更有价值的东西。回想华盛顿州内陆。使该地区成为农业聚宝盆的河流通道正是在很大程度上将小麦从当地生产组合中挤出的相同因素。
This brings us back to wheat. Wheat today is mostly grown on marginal lands, particularly on lands that are marginal because they are already too dry for any other crop. The key word there is “dry.” One of the things we have discovered in the past thirty years is that most plants are like most people: they are fairly temperature hardy so long as they can access more water. This balance between water and heat is everything in agriculture. Eastern Wyoming and eastern Montana have the same precipitation profile, but Wyoming is just a touch warmer and so cannot grow anything, while Montana is firmly in the Wheat Belt. Heat stress is fairly manageable with sufficient irrigation. But if today’s wheat regions had extra water, they’d be growing something more valuable than wheat. Think back to interior Washington State. The very river access that enables the region to be an agricultural cornucopia is the same factor that has largely squeezed wheat out of the local production mix.
在发电量充足的富裕地区，海水淡化可能是一个部分选择。近年来，海水淡化背后的技术稳步提高，电力成本仅为 2005 年的三分之一。但在边缘地区附近种植小麦的海洋并不多——大部分是相当远的内陆。缺水恰恰是这些已经干旱、贫瘠的土地中的大多数很快将面临的问题，无论这些土地是在萨斯喀彻温省、堪萨斯州、卢甘斯克、南澳大利亚、克拉斯诺达尔、舍瓦、加济安泰普、圣克鲁斯，还是旁遮普邦中的任何一个。
In rich locations with ample electricity generation, desalination might be a partial option. The tech behind desalination has steadily improved in recent years, to the point that the power cost is but one-third of what it was as recently as 2005. But there aren’t a lot of oceans near marginal territories that grow wheat—most are fairly far inland. A lack of water is precisely what most of these already dry, already marginal lands will soon face, regardless of whether those lands are in Saskatchewan or Kansas or Luhansk or South Australia or Krasnodar or Shewa or Gaziantep or Santa Cruz or either of the Punjabs.
如果有的话，这比听起来要糟糕得多。对人类来说最重要的两种作物面临着最严重的危险：水循环中断导致的水稻，以及生长在即将变得更加干旱的已经干旱地区的小麦。
If anything, this is far worse than it sounds. The two most important crops for humanity are the ones facing the gravest danger: rice because of disruption to water cycles, and wheat because it is grown in already-dry areas that are about to become drier.
更进一步
A BIT FURTHER FORWARD
这——所有这一切——都来自天气数据的同一个相当短期的预测。在之后的几年和几十年里会发生更深层次的气候变化吗？或许。大概。好吧，几乎可以肯定。我缺乏提供细节的数据，所以我不会。但我可以回顾过去，帮助头脑清醒。毕竟，气候变化对人类来说并不陌生。
This—all of this—is from that same rather short-term projection from the weather data. Will deeper climate change occur in the years and decades after? Maybe. Probably. Okay, almost certainly. I lack the data to provide specifics, so I won’t. But I can cast a look back in time to help prime the mind. After all, climate change is not new to the human experience.
- 当今考古学家的最佳猜测是，区域性气候变化以持续的洪水袭击了印度河文明，使印度河的航向偏离了文明的城邦，随后发生了数十年的干旱，使每个人都处于高海拔和干燥状态。该文明的城邦没有联合起来应对挑战，而是陷入了自相残杀的自助餐，彻底摧毁了他们的集体文化，直到英国人偶然发现中部的一些废墟，我们才发现印度河文明的存在1800年代的巴基斯坦。直到一个世纪后在现代城市哈拉帕附近进行挖掘，我们才明白这一发现的意义。
- The best guess of today’s archaeologists is that a regional climate shift smacked the Indus River Civilization with persistent flooding that shifted the Indus’s course away from the civilization’s city-states, followed by a multi-decade drought that left everyone high and dry. Rather than banding together to deal with the challenge, the civilization’s city-states descended into a buffet of internecine cannibalism that so wholly destroyed their collective culture, we didn’t even discover that the Indus civilization existed until the Brits stumbled across some ruins in central Pakistan in the 1800s. We didn’t understand the significance of the find until excavations near the modern city of Harappa a century later.
- 在前面的章节中，我提到了青铜时代晚期的崩溃，一段大约在公元前 1200 年到 1150 年之间的干旱时期（可能是由火山引发的）。那时人类已经足够先进，可以把事情写下来，所以我们对气候变化的影响有了一些了解。显然这真的很艰难；地球上几乎每一个文明都崩溃了，包括我们所知的西方文明的所有祖先。
- In earlier chapters I referenced the Late Bronze Age Collapse, a period of (probably volcanically triggered) drought between roughly 1200 and 1150 BCE. Humans were advanced enough at that point to be able to write things down, so we have some idea as to the effects of the climatic shifts. Apparently it was really rough; nearly every civilization on the planet buckled, including all the forebears of what we know as Western Civilization.
- 最近，小冰河时代是从公元 1300 年到 1850 年左右的一段时期，与早期相比，温度下降了大约 0.3 摄氏度（比 1900 年低了约 0.8 摄氏度）。在已经凉爽的区域感觉到最大的疼痛。有大量（相对较新的）历史记录记录了苏格兰、瑞典、俄罗斯、中国、韩国和日本等地的生活困难。整个地区遭受“没有夏天”的岁月的记录实例比比皆是。你可以猜到每个人都吃得有多好。特别是那些没有夏天的年份之一——1816 年——即使在当时也异常寒冷。南至康涅狄格州的地区在 8 月的气温降至 40 多度，而伦敦在 7 月的降雪量为 6 英寸。玛丽·雪莱 (Mary Shelley) 将她的日子锁在屋子里，以躲避无尽的冷雨、雨夹雪、科学怪人。
- More recently, the Little Ice Age was a period from about 1300 to 1850 CE in which temperatures dipped by roughly 0.3 degrees Celsius compared to the earlier era (and about 0.8 degrees C cooler than 1900). The greatest pain was felt in zones that were already cool. There are plenty of (relatively recent) historical records chronicling the difficulty of life in places like Scotland, Sweden, Russia, China, Korea, and Japan. Documented instances of entire regions suffering years “without summer” abound. You can guess how well everyone ate. One of those summerless years in particular—1816—was abnormally cold even for the time. Locales as far south as Connecticut dropped into the low 40s in August, while London received six inches of snow in July. Mary Shelley spent her days locked inside to shelter against the endless cold rain, sleet, and snow while pounding out that airy, buoyant tale we know today as Frankenstein.
喂养一个新世界
Feeding a New World
除了小麦、大豆、玉米和大米这四大农作物之外，还有其他许多食品，每一种都有自己的未来。我们将打破前十七名。
Moving beyond the Big Four crops of wheat, soy, corn, and rice, there is a whole worldful of other food products, each with its own future. We’re going to break down the top seventeen.
畜牧业将对农业世界产生最大的影响，至少相对而言是这样。驯化小动物是人类最初的发明，甚至早于小麦和水稻的种植。从汉堡包到鸡翅再到培根再到鹅肝酱，这棵技术树给我们带来了人类最好的朋友和对谷物商店的观察。但是，就像几乎所有其他事物一样，工业革命与全球化秩序相结合才将肉类带给大众。
The biggest impacts to the world of agriculture will be felt in animal husbandry, at least in relative terms. The domestication of critters is the original human invention, predating even the farming of wheat and rice. And the same technological tree that brought us man’s best friend and whiskered watching of grain stores is responsible for everything from hamburgers to chicken wings to bacon to foie gras. But, just as with pretty much everything else, it took the Industrial Revolution combined with the globalized Order to bring meat to the masses.
在前工业时代，想要成为肉食者的人面临着三个挑战。首先，为家庭饲养动物。规模很小，因为输入限制阻止了动物的快速生长。你把残羹剩饭给了鸡；奶牛吃草并生产牛奶。动物蛋白是我们饮食的补充，可能除了牛奶和鸡蛋外，不是我们每天都吃的东西。工业时代的肥料农业成就产生了足够的过剩大豆和谷物来为动物提供饲料。
In the preindustrial era, would-be meat-eaters faced three challenges. First, animals were raised for the home. Scales were small because input limitations prevented rapid animal growth. You gave scraps to the chickens; cows grazed and produced milk. Animal protein was a supplement to our diets, and with the possible exception of milk and eggs, not something we had every day. It took the fertilizer-amped agricultural achievements of the Industrial Age to generate sufficient excess soy and grain production to provide fodder for animals.
与往常一样，第二个挑战是交通。散装长途运输活体动物是禁忌，因为它们需要喂食。唯一的例外是绵羊，这种动物可以最好地利用草进行新陈代谢，因此可以在草地上养肥。但即使在这里，羊（和牧羊人）也必须步行到镇上。铁路、轮船和卡车加快了速度，但真正的转变直到 20 世纪才发生，随着廉价冷藏运输的兴起。动物现在可以在运输前被屠宰和冷藏，而且尸体不必喂食。
The second challenge, as always, was transport. Shipping live animals long distances in bulk was a no-no because they would need to be fed. The sole exception was sheep, the critter that makes the best metabolic use of grass and so can be fattened up on the graze. But even here, the sheep (and shepherd) would have to walk to town. Railways and steamships and trucks sped things up, but the real shift didn’t occur until the twentieth century, with the rise of inexpensive refrigerated shipping. Animals could now be butchered and chilled before being shipped, and carcasses don’t have to be fed.
第三是成本。从动物身上获取相同的蛋白质和卡路里组合所需的投入大约是从植物中获取的九倍。离开农场，动物蛋白成为终极奢侈品。但在骑士团时代，收入随着总人口的增加而猛增。对各种肉类的需求激增，尤其是在 1990 年之后。
Third was cost. Getting the same mix of protein and calories from animals takes roughly nine times the input of getting them from plants. Move off the farm and animal protein becomes the ultimate luxury good. But in the era of the Order, incomes skyrocketed right along with the overall population. Demand for all sorts of meat exploded, particularly after 1990.
当然，在后全球化世界中，这一切都不是可持续的。用作饲料的农作物——尤其是玉米——的产量将会下降。将玉米和大豆运往饲养场以及将肉类运往世界各地的运输将步履蹒跚。全球收入将锐减，动物蛋白将重新回到大多数人的奢侈品领域。那里的关键词是“散装”。广义上的新世界仍将享有大量的粮食和大豆盈余，使其能够继续在畜牧业方面遵循工业化农业模式。
None of this, of course, is sustainable in a post-globalized world. Production of the crops used for fodder—most notably corn—will dip. Transport that brings corn and soy to the feedlots and meat to the world will falter. Global income will crater, returning animal protein to the realm of luxury for the bulk of the human population. The key word there is “bulk.” The New World writ large will still enjoy massive grain and soy surpluses, enabling it to continue following the industrial agricultural model as regards animal husbandry.
这是最大的大局。不过，有很多较小的仍然很大。
That’s the biggest big picture. There are plenty of smaller ones that are still pretty big, though.
交易量最大的肉类是猪肉（按价值计算第三大国际贸易农产品），它的故事简单得令人痛苦。猪肉是东亚首选的动物蛋白。全球一半的生猪饲养在中国，最近中国也成为世界上最大的猪肉进口国。任何将农场押注于长期需求的人中国将失去农场。丹麦和西班牙的二级猪肉生产中心将继续存在——它们距离中欧和东欧的混乱局面足够远，不会因安全问题而过度中断——但投入成本的上升将限制未来的产出。这使得美国人可以主宰其他市场，尤其是在东南亚，那里的当地人和中国人一样喜欢猪肉（按人均计算，越南人已经吃得更多了）。
The most traded meat is pork (the third-largest internationally traded agricultural product by value), and its story is painfully simple. Pork is the preferred animal protein for East Asia. Half of the global hog herd is raised in China, and recently China became the world’s largest pork importer as well. Anyone who has bet the farm on long-term demand from China will lose the farm. Secondary centers of pork production in Denmark and Spain will continue to exist—they are far enough away from the mess that will be Central and Eastern Europe to be unduly disrupted by security issues—but rising costs for inputs will curtail future output. That leaves it to the Americans to dominate the rest of the market, most notably in Southeast Asia, where the locals love pork just as much as the Chinese (in per capita terms, the Vietnamese already eat more).
接下来是鸡肉（按价值计算第十大国际贸易农产品）。它是迄今为止最便宜、最不挑剔的动物蛋白，但这仅仅是因为工业时代的投入。从历史上看，鸡体型小而骨瘦如柴，因为它们的饮食是餐桌残羹剩饭、虫子和草籽，但大量喂给它们谷物，它们就会长胖。一些人批评美国养鸡业大量使用围栏，但如果目标是让鸡肉成为动物蛋白中最便宜的，那是饲养它们的唯一方法。（真正的散养鸡每磅的成本比大多数牛排都高，无骨/去皮鸡胸肉的每磅成本比除菲力牛排本身以外的所有牛排都要高。*）这些美国的圈地解释了为什么美国是唯一重要的鸡肉出口国肉，以及为什么美国以外的鸡肉价格往往是国内价格的三倍或更多。
Next up is chicken (the tenth-largest internationally traded agricultural product by value). It is by far the cheapest and least finicky of the animal proteins, but only because of Industrial Age inputs. Historically chickens have been small and scrawny because their diet was table scraps, bugs, and grass seeds, but feed them grain in bulk and they get yuuuge. Some criticize the American chicken industry for the mass use of enclosures, but if the goal is to keep chicken as the cheapest of the animal proteins, that is the only way to raise them. (True free-range chickens cost more per pound than most steaks, with boneless/skinless chicken breasts costing more per pound than all steak cuts save filet mignon itself.*) Those American enclosures explain why the United States is the only significant exporter of chicken meat, and why chicken prices outside of America tend to be triple or more the price within.
从预测的角度来看，这简化了事情。美国的鸡肉生产不会受到去全球化的不利影响。对于许多人来说，美国鸡肉可能是唯一触手可及的进口肉类。
This simplifies things from a forecasting point of view. There is nothing about American chicken production that will be adversely impacted by deglobalization. For many, American chicken may be the only imported meat that remains within reach.
牛奶（按价值排名第 8）几千年来一直是人类饮食的核心，特别是在南亚、现在尼日利亚北部和肯尼亚的非洲部分地区以及整个西方世界。由于极易腐烂，牛奶很少离开其生产国，唯一（也是最大）的例外是欧盟单一市场，该市场已成为 . . . 奇怪的。欧盟有一项共同农业政策 (CAP)，这是一项补贴计划，是迄今为止欧盟最大的预算项目。CAP 不仅有助于保持非竞争性农业生产商的经营，而且无意中鼓励大型奶牛场在历史上不是主要奶制品生产国的国家如雨后春笋般涌现，尤其是荷兰、德国和波兰。结果是大量的过度投资，过度生产，奶酪（按价值排名第五）。但是移除欧盟，你就移除了 CAP，你就移除了欧洲大部分过剩的乳制品和奶酪生产。
Dairy milk (8th by value) has been central to the human diet for millennia, particularly in South Asia, the parts of Africa that are now northern Nigeria and Kenya, and throughout the Western world. Due to its extreme perishability, milk rarely leaves the country in which it is produced, with the sole (and large) exception of the EU’s single market, which has become . . . odd. The EU has a Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), a program of subsidies that is by far the EU’s largest budgetary line item. The CAP has not only helped keep noncompetitive agricultural producers in business but has also inadvertently encouraged large dairies to spring up in countries that historically had not been major dairy producers, most notably the Netherlands, Germany, and Poland. The result is massive overinvestment, overproduction, and product dumping on a global scale of all sorts of dairy products, most notably cheese (5th by value). But remove the EU and you remove the CAP and you remove the bulk of Europe’s excess dairy and cheese production.
美国通常比欧洲拥有更高质量和更便宜的牛奶，但易腐烂的问题限制了美国乳制品出口到低价值奶粉。美国人还没有发展出像法国那样的奶酪文化。法国人和意大利人——虽然很大CAP 的受益者——专注于生产高品质、广受欢迎的小众奶酪。无论欧盟发生什么情况，对它们的需求都将持续存在。我会亲自处理的。他们的销售范围无疑会缩小，但他们仍然能够很容易地进入北美和北非。
The United States as a rule has higher-quality and cheaper dairy milk than the Europeans, but the perishability issue limits American dairy exports to low-value milk powder. Americans just haven’t developed a cheese culture like, say, France. The French and Italians—while big beneficiaries of the CAP—have focused on producing high-quality, wildly desirable niche cheeses. Demand for them will persist no matter what happens to the EU. I will see to it personally. Their sales reach will undoubtedly shrink, but they’ll still be able to access North America and North Africa quite easily.
全球乳制品的真正未来在新西兰。新西兰人气候温和，夏季凉爽，冬季温暖，雨水充沛，没有天敌，因此他们的奶牛不需要庇护所——甚至不需要饲料。Kiwi dairy 的成本结构甚至比美国人低，他们生产的牛奶质量比美国人高，而且他们正在大力发展具有疯狂附加值的法式奶酪文化。*还有一件事：当一头奶牛不再生产时，它就会被送去屠宰。这个小细节使新西兰成为世界第五大 . . .
The real future of global dairy is New Zealand. The Kiwis enjoy a mild climate with cool summers and warm winters and lots of rain and no predators, so their cows do not require shelter—or even fodder. Kiwi dairy has a cost structure that’s even lower than the Americans, they produce milk of higher quality than the Americans, and they are well into developing a French-style cheese culture that is insanely value added.* One more thing: when a dairy cow is no longer productive, it is sent to slaughter. That little detail has made New Zealand the world’s fifth-largest exporter of . . .
牛肉（按价值排名第 11）。与新西兰人一起，全球牛肉的主要参与者是美国、澳大利亚、荷兰、加拿大和爱尔兰。在这六个国家中，美国处于最佳位置，主要是因为它拥有大片联邦土地，牛肉生产商可以租用这些土地放牧。*另一方面，从长远来看，澳大利亚的气候不稳定将使其成为主要出口国中最不可靠的。只有与 CAP 相关的收入支持才有可能将牛肉从荷兰和爱尔兰运出。
Beef (11th by value). Along with the Kiwis, the major players in global beef are the United States, Australia, the Netherlands, Canada, and Ireland. Of these six, the United States is in the best position, primarily because it has vast tracts of federal land that beef producers can lease for grazing.* On the flip side, Australia’s climatic instability will make it the least reliable of the major exporters over the long term. Beef out of the Netherlands and Ireland is possible only with CAP-related income support.
从技术上讲，印度和巴西也是主要的生产国和出口国，尽管从技术上讲，他们的“牛肉”不是来自牛，而是来自一种叫做瘤牛的动物，这种动物更适应热带的闷热。这将他们的产品推入质量较低的类别，但没有理由期望它会在去全球化的世界中消失。如果有的话，巴西的基础设施限制将使大豆陷入困境巴西内陆并鼓励生产和出口更多的瘤牛，因为它比未加工的大豆具有更高的附加值。按照牛肉标准，瘤牛的质量可能很低，但在成本受限的世界里，便宜的肉本身就有吸引力。
Technically, India and Brazil are major producers and exporters as well, although—again, technically—their “beef” isn’t from cattle, but instead from a critter called the zebu, which is more acclimated to the sultriness of the tropics. This pushes their product into a lower quality category, but there’s no reason to expect it to go away in a deglobalized world. If anything, infrastructure constraints in Brazil will trap soy in the Brazilian interior and encourage the production and export of more zebu since it will have a higher value-add than raw soy. Zebu may be low quality by beef standards, but in a cost-constrained world, cheaper meat will have an attraction all its own.
对于其他想要牛肉的人来说，选择很少。就像字面意思一样，苗条。典型的美国（以及加拿大、澳大利亚和巴西）肉牛是巨大的野兽，在屠宰时体重通常超过一吨。此外，它们会在几个月内长到这样的大小，这主要是因为它们以玉米和大豆为食，并定期注射抗生素和激素以促进膨胀和提高存活率。更传统的放养肉牛和较少操纵的肉牛需要三到五倍的时间才能成熟，最终肩部短一英尺，而且屠宰重量通常不到操纵较多的同龄人的三分之一——顺便说一句使他们成为成本最高的动物蛋白。这种“传统”奶牛对某些人来说可能味道更好，但在一个贸易和准入受限的世界里，它们低得多的生产力水平将使大多数人的牛肉从有时成为食物变成几乎从来没有食物。
For everyone else who wants beef, options are slim. Like literally, slim. Typical American (and Canadian and Aussie and Brazilian) beef cattle are massive beasts that regularly weigh in at over a ton at the time of slaughter. Also, they grow to that size in a matter of months, largely because they are fed a steady diet of corn and soy, as well as getting regular injections of antibiotics and hormones to encourage bulking and survival rates. More traditional beef cattle that are range fed and less manipulated take three to five times as long to mature, end up a foot shorter at the shoulder, and typically have a slaughter weight less than one-third that of their more manipulated peers—which incidentally makes them the highest-cost animal protein. Such “heritage” cows may taste better to some mouths, but in a world of constrained trade and access, their far lower productivity levels will elevate beef for the bulk of humanity from a sometimes food to an almost-never food.
没有咖啡我的世界无法运转（按价值排名第七）我是。. . 担心的。咖啡很像可卡因。. . 就可以种植的地方而言。它需要高度、温度和湿度条件的非常具体的组合。太干了，庄稼会枯萎。太湿了，它会腐烂。太热而且很苦。太冷了就不开花了。大约 7,500 英尺是理想的海拔高度，远远高于大多数人类居住线，这使得维修和运输变得棘手。大众咖啡文化只有在全球化系统中才有可能，在这种系统中，输入可以进入这些通常几乎无法进入的区域。从麦当劳到您最喜欢的浓缩咖啡吧，您在任何地方买到的阿拉比卡咖啡都面临着最大的挑战，而速溶的罗布斯塔咖啡则更耐热和耐旱。
My world cannot function without coffee (7th by value) and I am . . . concerned. Coffee is a lot like cocaine . . . in terms of where it can be grown. It demands a very specific mix of elevation, temperature, and moisture conditions. Too dry and the crop shrivels. Too wet and it rots. Too hot and it is bitter. Too cold and it won’t flower. Roughly 7,500 feet is the ideal elevation, putting it well above most lines of human habitation and making servicing and transport tricky. Mass coffee culture is only possible in a globalized system in which the inputs can access such often-near-inaccessible areas. The Arabica coffee you get at everything from McDonald’s to your favorite espresso bar faces the greatest challenges, while the robusta coffee that goes into instant is far more heat and drought tolerant. The combination of deglobalization and climate change suggests that most of the world is about to get a coffee downgrade.
棕榈油（按价值排名第六）无处不在。在非食品项目中，它出现在肥皂、洗发水、除臭剂和牙膏中。它也存在于几乎所有可以想象到的加工食品中。而黄油和橄榄油可能用于本地分发的小批量食品制备，除非有一些尖端的加工技术，否则乳制品和橄榄在受到过热或移动时往往会变质和/或变苦。而且无论如何，棕榈油比两者都便宜。这需要将输入切换为棕榈油，以保护质地并延长保质期，尤其是在产品可涂抹的情况下。没有棕榈油就意味着没有人造黄油、比萨饼面团、方便面、冰淇淋，或者——倒吸一口气——花生酱！
Palm oil (6th by value) is ubiquitous. In nonfood items it shows up in soaps, shampoos, deodorants, and toothpastes. It is also in nearly every processed food product imaginable. Whereas butter and olive oil may be used in small-batch food preparation for local distribution, barring some cutting-edge processing technologies, dairy and olive tend to spoil and/or turn bitter when subjected to excessive heat or movement. And anyhow, palm oil is cheaper than both. That necessitates an input switch to palm oil to protect texture and extend shelf life, particularly if the product is spreadable. No palm oil would mean no margarine, pizza dough, instant noodles, ice cream, or—gasp—Nutella!
棕榈需要肥沃的土壤，绝对没有寒冷，而且一直有大量的水，这使其成为沿海热带地区的理想选择。迄今为止最大的生产商在东南亚。前进的主要问题将是土壤肥力。东南亚人从事刀耕火种的农业以产生必要的土壤养分，但这只能真正做到一次。之后，就是施肥或破灭，东南亚可能会出现肥料短缺，最明显的是钾肥和磷肥。
Palm requires fertile soil, absolutely no cold, and loads of water all the time, making it ideal for coastal tropics. The biggest producers by far are in Southeast Asia. The primary problem moving forward will be soil fertility. The Southeast Asians engage in slash-and-burn agriculture to generate the necessary soil nutrients, but that can only really be done once. After that, it is fertilize or bust, and Southeast Asia is likely to experience shortages of fertilizers, most notably the potassium and phosphate types.
有几个补丁。使棕榈油起作用的是它的脂肪：将氢添加到构成油分子碳氢化合物主链的碳原子上，它在室温下变成固体（这是您在大多数加工过的成分标签上看到的“氢化”位食物）。虽然棕榈油是最好的（也是最便宜的！），但也可以用大豆、玉米或棉籽油来做。它没有那么好吃——正如许多欧洲人在哀叹富含大豆油和玉米油的美国加工食品时会详细讨论的那样——但它仍然有效。然而，走出温带世界，这些选择变得更加困难——尤其是在全球贸易崩溃的情况下。
There are a few patches. What makes palm oil work is its fat: add hydrogen to the carbon atoms that make up the hydrocarbon backbone of an oil molecule and it becomes a solid at room temperature (this is the “hydrogenated” bit you see on the ingredients label of most processed food). While palm oil is the best (and cheapest!) for this, it can be done with soy, corn, or cottonseed oil as well. It isn’t as tasty—as many Europeans will discuss at length when lamenting soy-oil- and corn-oil-heavy American processed food—but it still works. Move outside of the temperate zone world, however, and these options become more difficult—especially if global trade is breaking down.
发达国家的棕榈油贸易损失是一个非常第一世界的问题：它关乎味道和质地。对于发展中国家来说，这关乎保质期，而这很快就会从方便变成恐怖。许多人可能认为普遍获得加工食品是肥胖的根本原因，他们并没有错。但这种访问也是凤凰社的荣耀之一。大多数发展中国家在没有耐贮存食品的情况下维持大量人口的经验为零。从不能自己生产食用油的地区去除棕榈油，季节性饥荒是绝对有保证的。
A loss of palm oil trade for the advanced world is a very first-world problem: it is about taste and texture. For the developing world it is about shelf life, and that rapidly translates from convenience into terror. Many may think of universal access to processed food as a root cause of obesity, and they are not wrong. But such access is also one of the glories of the Order. Most of the developing world has zero experience in maintaining large populations without shelf-stable food. Remove palm oil from areas that cannot produce their own cooking oil and seasonal famines are absolutely guaranteed.
在伊比利亚人以海军为动力的香料贸易打破丝绸之路后，许多欧洲帝国转而争吵糖（按价值排名第 12 位）。蔗糖很挑剔。它需要恒定的水，但也需要热量，并且更喜欢冲积冲积平原和无盐。地球上很少有地方符合这样的标准。大多数在巴西和加勒比地区。在 1800 年代，德国人与英国人争吵，因此他们无法从温暖的地方接触到所有东西。他们的解决方案是砍伐当地植物并杂交培育出我们现在所知的甜菜。甜菜在寒冷的气候下也很好，就像普通甜菜一样。*这表明任何相当凉爽的温带气候——包括德国、俄罗斯、土耳其、加拿大、法国和美国北部——都应该能够采购甜菜糖。
After the Iberians broke the Silk Roads with their naval-powered spice trade, many of the European empires turned to squabbling over sugar (12th by value). Cane sugar is very fussy. It needs constant water, but also heat, and prefers alluvial floodplains and no salt. There are very few spots on the planet that meet such criteria. Most are in Brazil and the Caribbean. In the 1800s the Germans were sparring with the Brits, and in doing so they lost access to all things from warm places. Their solution was to hack local plants and crossbreed into existence what we now know as sugar beets. Sugar beets are just fine in colder climates, just like normal beets.* This suggests that any reasonably cool, temperate-zone climate—and that includes Germany, Russia, Turkey, Canada, France, and the northern United States—should be able to source beet sugar.
蔗糖之王——让我们面对现实吧，它的味道比甜菜糖好得多——是古巴，它拥有适合通常挑剔产品的完美气候。任何能够与古巴人保持正常经济关系的国家都将享受到甜蜜的海啸。. . 这绝对会破坏更昂贵、质量更低的甜菜糖的经济效益。*
The king of cane sugar—which, let’s face it, tastes much better than beet sugar—is Cuba, which has the perfect climate for what is normally a picky product. Any country able to sustain normal economic relations with the Cubans will enjoy a tsunami of the sweet stuff . . . which would absolutely wreck the economics of more expensive, lower-quality beet sugar.*
烟草（按价值排名第 14 位）是一种茄属植物，需要温暖和水分，但又不会太热或太湿。这意味着范围很窄：卡罗莱纳、安纳托利亚、巴西和印度尼西亚较干燥的地区、非洲大裂谷高地较凉爽的地带、印度沿海地区以及中国的云南、湖南和四川地区。没有全球影响力，不仅没有全球石油或全球制造业，也没有全球烟草。如果您对香烟上瘾并且无法立即进入这些生产区之一，那么去全球化将帮助您戒烟。法国、波兰和俄罗斯的尼古丁迷们在获得致癌的死亡之棒方面将面临特别困难。
Tobacco (14th by value) is a nightshade, demanding warmth and moisture without getting too hot or wet. That means a narrow list of locales: the Carolinas, Anatolia, the drier portions of Brazil and Indonesia, a strip of the cooler portions of Africa’s Great Rift highlands, pockets of coastal India, and China’s Yunnan, Hunan, and Sichuan regions. Without global reach there is not only no global oil or global manufacturing, there is no global tobacco. If you are hooked on cigarettes and lack near-immediate access to one of those production zones, deglobalization is about to help you quit. French, Polish, and Russian nicotine fiends will face particular difficulty in accessing cancer-causing sticks of death.
香蕉（按价值排名第 18）在类型方面差异很大，但都具有三个关键特征。首先，他们需要完整的热带地区以及随之而来的高温、高湿、持续不断的水分和缺乏冬季。
Bananas (18th by value) vary wildly in terms of type, but all have three key characteristics. First, they need the full tropics and the high heat, high humidity, constant water, and lack of winter that come with them.
其次，种植和收获香蕉可以说是最耗费劳动力和化肥的农业过程。您不仅仅需要热带地区；您需要一个非常贫穷、人口非常稠密且具有可靠国际接入的国家。
Second, cultivating and harvesting bananas is arguably the most labor-intensive and fertilizer-intensive agricultural process. You don’t simply need the tropics; you need a very poor, very densely populated country with reliable international access.
第三，香蕉——尤其是美国人喜欢的卡文迪什品种——是克隆香蕉，这使得它们极易受到害虫，尤其是真菌病害的侵害。如果一棵香蕉树被感染，通常整个种植园都必须被夷为平地。对于那些拒绝吃任何被人工接触过的东西的有机爱好者来说，要知道有机香蕉种植园周围大约半英里的半径实际上已经被（显然是非有机的）杀虫剂、除草剂和杀菌剂摧毁，以保护你的倾向。有机物也往往生长在更高、更干燥的海拔，以在一定程度上限制害虫，这意味着香蕉需要大量灌溉才能生长。结果是食品与最高的化学和碳足迹，以及在任何行业的任何产品系列中最高的人员死亡流失率。快乐的吃。
Third, bananas—especially the Cavendish variety Americans enjoy—are clones, making them eminently, dangerously vulnerable to pests and especially fungal diseases. Should a single banana tree get infected, typically the entire plantation must be razed. For those of you organic buffs out there who refuse to eat anything that’s been touched with anything artificial, know that a roughly half-mile radius around organic banana plantations is practically nuked with (eminently non-organic) pesticides and herbicides and fungicides to protect your proclivities. Organics also tend to be grown at higher, drier elevations to somewhat limit pests, which means the bananas need massive irrigation to grow. The result is the food product with the highest chemical and carbon footprint, as well as the highest staff turnovers from death in any product set in any industry. Happy eating.
棉花（按价值排名第 17）是一种奇怪的植物，因为它需要大量的水和阳光，而且地球上没有那么多沼泽地。. . 沙漠。解决办法当然是灌溉。埃及人抽取尼罗河，巴基斯坦人抽取印度河，土库曼人和乌兹别克人抽取阿姆河和锡尔河。仅去全球化就会迫使这四个民族从可以卖到国外的棉花转向他们可以食用的农作物，即使没有发生去全球化，一点点气候变化也会减少这四个国家可用于灌溉的水。
Cotton (17th by value) is a weird plant in that it needs loads of water and sun and there just aren’t that many places on the planet that are swampy . . . deserts. The solution, of course, is irrigation. The Egyptians tap the Nile, the Pakistanis tap the Indus, and the Turkmen and Uzbeks tap the Amu and Syr. Deglobalization alone will force the four peoples to shift from cotton they can sell abroad to crops they can eat, and even if deglobalization does not occur, a touch of climate change will reduce the water the four have available for irrigation.
中国棉花面临更大的问题，不是（简单地）因为它生长在新疆种族灭绝的拘留-地狱-奴隶制，而是因为新疆的河流不流向海洋，而是流入内部的、终端的、很久以前沙漠化的塔里木盆地. 这些河流干涸到毫无意义的地步，只需在气候规范上做出痛苦的微小改变，用它们来灌溉新疆干涸的棉田，没有任何希望。印度棉花可能更具可持续性，但它完全依赖于季风，因此其生产肯定会失去可靠性。
Chinese cotton faces even bigger issues, not (simply) because it is grown in the genocidal internment-hellscape-slavocracy of Xinjiang, but because the rivers of Xinjiang flow not to the ocean but into the internal, terminal, long-ago desertified Tarim Basin. It would take painfully little shifts in climate norms for those rivers to dry to the point of pointlessness, taking any hope for irrigating Xinjiang’s thirsty cotton fields with them. Indian cotton will likely be more sustainable, but it is all monsoon dependent, so its production is certain to lose reliability.
无论你如何编织这条毯子，我们都会面临全球棉花短缺。
No matter how you knit this blanket, we will have a global cotton shortage.
能够继续发挥的大型生产国只有两个：巴西和美国这两个西半球国家。他们的棉花可能不是世界喜欢的长绒品种，但它产自更安全的半球，几乎不需要那么多的灌溉，这使得巴西和美国的供应在未来的世界中更加可靠。
There are only two large-scale producers that can continue to play: the Western Hemispheric countries of Brazil and the United States. Their cotton might not be the long-staple variety the world prefers, but it is produced in the safer hemisphere and it doesn’t require nearly as much irrigation, making Brazilian and American supplies far more reliable in the world to come.
柑橘（第 16 位）有点像棉花，因为它需要大量的热量和水分。幸运的是，它也喜欢大量的湿度，在可以种植的地方扩张。柑橘的未来非常明朗。在气候适宜、降雨量充足、不需要灌溉的地方——主要是佛罗里达州和巴西北部——一切看起来都像桃子一样。但在那些通过大量使用资本、化肥和灌溉实现了修道院的典型影响的地方——最著名的是埃及和西班牙——你应该和你的橙子和葡萄柚吻别了。
Citrus (16th) is a bit like cotton in its desire for a lot of heat and water. Luckily, it also likes a lot of humidity, expanding where cultivation is possible. The future of citrus is pretty clear. In locations where the climate is appropriate, sporting enough rainfall that irrigation isn’t required—primarily Florida and northern Brazil—everything looks peachy. But in those places where the quintessential effects of the Order have enabled cultivation via the mass application of capital, fertilizer, and irrigation—most notably Egypt and Spain—you should kiss your oranges and grapefruits goodbye.
任何多汁的葡萄树都需要持续、有控制的浇水，无论是食用葡萄还是酿酒葡萄（按价值排名第 20）。水太少，它们就会枯萎。太多了，他们分裂了。关键是控制，这意味着干燥的气候加上灌溉能力。一些世界上最好的葡萄来自干旱地区，尤其是加利福尼亚、意大利、西班牙、阿根廷、澳大利亚、智利、伊朗和华盛顿州的大哥伦比亚河流域的沙漠。
Anything juicy and on a vine needs consistent, controlled watering, whether it be table or wine grapes (20th by value). Too little water and they shrivel. Too much and they split. The key is control, and that means dry climates plus the capacity for irrigation. Some of the world’s best grapes come from the arid regions and especially deserts of California, Italy, Spain, Argentina, Australia, Chile, Iran, and Washington State’s Greater Columbia River Valley.
供给会下降。灌溉需要资金，这在过去三十年的葡萄酒世界中一直不是问题。很快就会了。但供应只会下降一点点。大多数生产商要么是新世界，要么像南非和法国一样，至少在一定程度上对即将到来的混乱免疫。
Supply will drop. Irrigation requires capital, which in the world of wine hasn’t been a problem the last three decades. Soon it will be. But supply will drop only a bit. Most producers are either New World or—like South Africa and France—at least partially immune to the chaos to come.
相反，需求将下降更多。打破全球经济增长全球对高成本烈酒的需求将随之中断。总的来说，葡萄酒是那些可能会变得更便宜的稀有农产品之一。不幸的是，我不太适合预测葡萄酒是否会变得更好。*
Demand, in contrast, will drop more. Break global economic growth and global demand for high-cost tipple will break with it. On balance, wine is one of those rare agricultural products that might get cheaper. Whether the wine gets any better is unfortunately something I am not well suited to forecasting.*
向日葵（按价值排名第 19 位）和油菜籽（第 23 位）——压榨榨油的中耕作物——的首选气候位于较凉爽的半干旱地区。世界上最大的供应商包括可能会退出市场的乌克兰和加拿大的草原省份，它们几乎将所有产品出口到中国，这个市场将会崩溃。对加拿大人来说幸运的是，大部分向日葵和油菜籽种植区都可以改用于小麦生产。
The preferred climate for both sunflowers (19th by value) and canola (23rd)—row crops that are crushed for their oil—is in cooler, semiarid zones. Among the world’s biggest suppliers are Ukraine, which is likely to fall off the market, and Canada’s Prairie Provinces, which ship almost all their output to China, a market that will implode. Luckily for the Canadians, most sunflower and canola territory can be repurposed to wheat production.
苹果和梨（总价值排名第 21 位）曾经是容易收割的作物，但在全球化的秩序中，我们都认为网球大小的苹果不会削减它。如果你想要一个头那么大的苹果，你需要施肥和灌溉。其结果是，不仅在国家之间，而且在国家内部，市场都出现了严重的市场分割。这种多样性中的大部分需要接触不同的微气候，而在我们互动不多的世界中，这种多样性必然会受到限制。将从全球市场上消失的最大出口国是那些根本无法将产品运出的国家：最明显的是大部分欧洲国家和中国（无论如何，它们的苹果有点难吃）。东南亚和拉丁美洲的大增长市场应该没问题；这对美国、阿根廷和智利的种植者来说是个好消息。
Apples and pears (collectively 21st by value) used to be the easy crop, but in the globalized Order we all decided apples the size of tennis balls just wouldn’t cut it. If you want an apple the size of your head, you need fertilizer and irrigation. The result has been a wild degree of market segmentation not just among countries, but within them. Much of this variety requires access to different microclimes, and in a world where we aren’t interacting as much, that variety will be necessarily limited. The biggest gross exporters that will vanish from global markets are those who simply cannot get their product out: most notably the bulk of the European countries and China (whose apples are a touch nasty anyway). The big growth markets in Southeast Asia and Latin America should be fine; that’s great news for growers in the United States, Argentina, and Chile.
最后，我们来看看是什么让美味巧克力成为可能：可可（按价值排名第 22 位）。可以把它想象成一种更耐热、海拔更低的咖啡，更喜欢热带湿度。它几乎只来自两个地方：西非产出在安全和贸易准入以及材料投入和资本采购（可能还有气候）方面面临限制，而墨西哥则看起来。. . 完全没问题。如果你更喜欢略带果味的中美洲品种，你会保持良好的状态。但是，如果你对巧克力的想法是超致密、大锤重、敲你的屁股、给我巧克力或给我死亡的感觉，西非可可就是以这种感觉而闻名，生活即将变得不那么甜蜜了。
Finally, we come to what makes glorious, glorious chocolate possible: cocoa (22nd by value). Think of it as a more heat-tolerant, lower-elevation version of coffee, with a preference for tropical humidity. It pretty much only comes from two places: West African output faces constraints in security and trade access and material inputs and capital sourcing (and likely, climate), while Mexico looks . . . completely fine. If you prefer the slightly fruity Central American varieties, you’ll be in good shape. But if your idea of chocolate is the ultra-dense, sledgehammer-heavy, knock-you-on-your-ass, give-me-chocolate-or-give-me-death now sensation for which West African cocoa is known, life is about to get a lot less sweet.
第三骑士的长途跋涉
The Long Ride of the Third Horseman
在 2020 年 COVID 封锁期间的生存恐惧期间，我总结了过去十年的工作经验，得出的结论是我已经做了 600 多次演讲。不同的主题。不同的观众。不同国家。在如此广泛的不同主题和地点中，一个问题一次又一次地出现：是什么让你彻夜难眠？
In between periods of existential dread during the 2020 COVID lockdown, I was tallying up my work experience of the past decade and came to the conclusion that I had given more than six hundred presentations. Different topics. Different audiences. Different countries. Across such widely varying swaths of themes and places, one question popped up time and again: What keeps you up at night?
我总能找到问题。. . 好奇的。我不是那种给房间带来阳光和独角兽河流的人。
I’ve always found the question . . . curious. I am not known as the guy who brings rays of sunshine and rivers of unicorns to a room.
无论如何，本章的核心是我对这个问题的回答。
Anywho, at its core, this chapter is my answer to the question.
同一个神圣不可侵犯的互连网络为我们带来了从快速抵押贷款到智能手机再到按需供电的一切，不仅还填饱了 80 亿人的肚子，反季的牛油果也填饱了肚子。这在很大程度上已经过去了。网络正在失败。刚刚过去的地平线隐约可见一个农业产量较低且不太可靠的世界，因品种较少而受到损害。一个能源较少或制成品较少的世界是财富与安全或贫困与冲突之间的区别。但是，一个食物较少的世界就是一个人口较少的世界。
The same webwork of sacrosanct interconnections that has brought us everything from quick mortgages to smartphones to on-demand electricity has not only also filled 8 billion bellies, it has done so with the odd out-of-season avocado. That’s now largely behind us. The web is failing. Just past the horizon looms a world of lower and less reliable agricultural yields, marred by less variety. A world with less energy or fewer manufactured goods is the difference between wealth and security or poverty and conflict. But a world with fewer foodstuffs is one with fewer people.
不仅仅是战争，不仅仅是疾病，饥荒是最终的国家杀手。这不是人类状况可以快速或轻松调整的东西。
More than war, more than disease, famine is the ultimate country killer. And it is not something the human condition can adjust to quickly or easily.
正是工业化和城市化的神奇结合使现代性成为可能，而正是这些相互交织的因素受到了如此极端的威胁。削弱这对货币对，更不用说分解它们了，至少需要一代人的时间来重建能够养活 80 亿人的金融渠道和制造业供应链以及技术发展和劳动力的组合。并且在这样做所需的时间内 。. . 我们将不再有80 亿人口。
It is the magic mix of industrialization and urbanization that makes modernity possible, and it is precisely those intertwined factors that are under such extreme threat. Weaken the pair, much less break them down, and it will take at bare minimum a generation to rebuild a mix of financial access and manufacturing supply chains and technological evolutions and labor forces that are capable of feeding 8 billion people. And in the time it takes to do that . . . we will no longer have 8 billion people.
未来五十年的历史将讲述我们如何应对——或未能应对——即将到来的粮食短缺。这些短缺——某些范围内是大陆性的——将如何造成它们自身的环境变化。世界各地的政治和经济体系将如何应对一个比其他一切加在一起都更重要的短缺。
The history of the next fifty years will be the story of how we deal with—or fail to deal with—the coming food shortages. How those shortages—some continental in scope—will create their own changes in circumstance. How political and economic systems the world over will grapple with the one shortfall that matters more than everything else combined.
这就是让我夜不能寐的原因。
That is what keeps me up at night.
结语
Epilogue
所以 。. . 那是简短的版本。谢谢你和我在一起。
So . . . that’s the short version. Thanks for sticking with me.
（更长）更长的版本是我余下的工作生活，为大大小小的观众扩展这个或那个未来。希望有一点幽默感（绞刑架或其他）来控制这个话题自我产生的悲观情绪。
The (much) longer version is the rest of my work life, expanding on this or that bit of the future for audiences large and small. Hopefully with a bit of humor (gallows or otherwise) to keep the topic’s self-generating pessimism in check.
我在通往世界尽头的路上停了几站，但对我个人来说最重要的一次是放弃了我的信仰。
I’ve had a few stops on my road to The End of the World, but the most personally consequential one involves the tucking away of my beliefs.
作为一名历史专业的学生，我觉得我比一般的简或乔更欣赏过去 75 年的巨大进步。作为一名国际主义者，我相信我明白我们已经走了多远。作为一名绿党，我认为我看到了一条前进的道路，即使这不是大多数绿党所信服的。作为一名民主人士（小d），我知道民众参与是“最不坏的政府形式”。信不信由你，我认为自己是一个乐观主义者。
As a student of history, I feel I appreciate the vast improvements of the past seventy-five years more than the average Jane or Joe. As an internationalist, I believe I understand just how far we’ve come. As a Green, I think I see a path forward, even if it isn’t the one most Greens are convinced of. And as a democrat (little d), I know popular participation is the “least bad form of government.” Believe it or not, I consider myself an optimist.
但这与我所做的无关紧要。预测很难，因为很难在门口检查您的个人喜好和意识形态。我的工作是通知将要发生的事情。不是我想要发生的。什么人群并不重要。政府、军队或平民。制造、金融或农业。我不喜欢告诉别人坏消息，而且我（经常）让人们不高兴。
But that matters little to what I do. Forecasting is hard because checking your personal preferences and ideologies at the door is hard. My job is to inform about what will happen. Not what I want to happen. Doesn’t really matter what crowd. Government, military, or civilian. Manufacturing, financing, or agriculture. I don’t enjoy giving people bad news, and I (often) make folks unhappy.
它变得更容易了。告诉。不是新闻。
It has gotten easier. The telling. Not the news.
感谢巴拉克奥巴马令人沮丧、令人印象深刻的疏离领导以及唐纳德特朗普同样令人沮丧、令人印象深刻的脱节领导，我们与我想看到的世界相去甚远，我更容易埋葬我的个人偏好并获得继续评估世界状况的工作。并写下这本书。
Courtesy of the depressing, impressively disengaged leadership of Barack Obama and the equally depressing, impressively disconnected leadership of Donald Trump, we are so far off from the world that I want to see, it has gotten easier for me to bury my personal preferences and get on with the work of assessing the state of the world. And write this book.
这不是号召性用语。在我看来，早在十多年前，我们就错过了走另一条路的机会——一条更好的路。乃至如果我今天有一个可行的计划，那些有兴趣在重塑世界中发挥建设性作用并着眼于更光明未来的美国人已经输掉了最近八次总统选举。我可能会说唯一的例外是最近的一个。在特朗普与拜登的竞选中，像我这样的国际主义者甚至没有人参选。
This is not a call to action. In my opinion, we missed a chance to go down a separate road—a better road—well over a decade ago. And even if I had a viable plan for today, Americans who are interested in playing a constructive role in recrafting the world with an eye toward a brighter future have lost the last eight presidential elections. I might say the singular exception was the most recent one. In the Trump-Biden contest, internationalists like myself didn’t even have a guy in the race.
这个项目也不是对世界的悲叹。冷战结束后，美国人几乎有机会做任何事情。相反，无论是左翼还是右翼，我们都开始懒惰地堕入自恋民粹主义。为我们带来克林顿、W 布什、奥巴马、特朗普和拜登的总统选举记录并不是一种反常现象，而是一种对更广阔的世界积极不感兴趣的模式。这是我们的新常态。这本书是关于规范的导向。
Nor is this project a lamentation for the world that could have been. When the Cold War ended, the Americans had the opportunity to do nearly anything. Instead, both on the Left and the Right, we started a lazy descent into narcissistic populism. The presidential election record that brought us Clinton and W Bush and Obama and Trump and Biden isn’t an aberration, but instead a pattern of active disinterest in the wider world. It is our new norm. This book is about where that norm leads.
美国之外也没有领导力。没有新的霸权在等待，也没有国家会起来支持共同的愿景。没有救世主在等待。取而代之的是，世界次要大国已经重新回到相互对抗的老习惯中。
Nor is there leadership beyond America. There is no new hegemon-in-waiting, nor countries that will rise to support a common vision. There is no savior waiting in the wings. Instead, the world’s secondary powers have already fallen back into their old habits of mutual antagonism.
事实证明，欧洲人在他们历史上最和平、最富裕的时期无法团结起来制定共同的奶酪政策、共同的银行业政策、共同的外交政策或共同的难民政策——更不用说共同的战略政策了。没有全球化，将近三代人的成就将蒸发。也许欧洲对乌克兰战争的反应会证明我错了。但愿如此。
The Europeans, in the most peaceful and wealthy period in their history, have proven incapable of coming together for a common cheese policy, a common banking policy, a common foreign policy, or a common refugee policy—much less a common strategic policy. Without globalization, nearly three generations of achievement will boil away. Perhaps the European response to the Ukraine War will prove me wrong. I hope so.
中国和俄罗斯已经退回到本能，无视他们自己长期传奇的教训。在后冷战时代，这对夫妇从美国的参与中获益最多，因为骑士团阻止了几个世纪以来使他们陷入贫困、瓦解和征服的大国充分发挥自己的力量，同时为最伟大的国家创造了条件他们所知道的经济稳定。他们没有寻求与美国人和解以保持他们的神奇时刻，而是勤奋地——几乎是病态地——破坏全球结构的剩余部分。未来的历史对他们将像他们黑暗和危险的过去一样无情。
China and Russia have already fallen back on instinct, heedless of the lessons of their own long sagas. In the post–Cold War era, the pair benefited the most by far from American engagement, as the Order prevented the powers that had impoverished, shattered, and conquered them through the centuries from fully exerting themselves, while simultaneously creating the circumstances for the greatest economic stability they have ever known. Instead of seeking rapprochement with the Americans to preserve their magical moment, they instead worked diligently—almost pathologically—to disrupt what remained of global structures. Future history will be as merciless to them as their dark and dangerous pasts.
如果有的话，人类的下一章将更加严峻，就目前而言我们有人口统计角度可以融入其中。在大多数国家，不归路点在 19 80左右。那是大量二十多岁和三十多岁的人干脆停止生育的时候。快进四十年到现在，这个没有孩子的一代现在退休了。大多数发达国家都面临着迫在眉睫的同时发生的消费、生产和金融崩溃。先进的发展中国家——包括中国——的境况更糟了。在那里，城市化和工业化发生得更快，因此出生率下降得更快。他们更快的衰老决定了更快的崩溃。数字告诉我们，这一切都必须在这十年内发生。数字告诉我们它总是将在这十年内发生。
If anything, humanity’s next chapter will be even more grim, for now we have the demographic angle to fold into the mix. In most countries, the point of no return passed around 1980. That’s when masses of twenty-and thirty-somethings simply stopped having children. Fast-forward four decades to the present and this childless generation is now retiring. Most of the developed world faces imminent, simultaneous consumption, production, and financial collapses. The advanced developing world—China included—is, if anything, worse off. There, urbanization and industrialization happened much more quickly, so birth rates crumpled all the faster. Their even-faster aging dictates an even-faster collapse. The numbers tell us that it all must happen in this decade. The numbers tell us it was always going to happen in this decade.
我无法为您提供更好的前进方式。我也无法为从未发生过的事情向您致以悼词。地理不会改变。人口统计数据不会说谎。关于国家和人民如何对其环境做出反应，我们有着悠久的历史。
I cannot provide you with a better way forward. Nor can I provide you with a eulogy for something that never happened. Geography does not change. Demographics do not lie. And we have a historyful of history as to how countries and peoples react to their environment.
然而，我能做的是给你一张地图。以书的形式。
What I can do, however, is provide you a map. In book form.
有备则无患。
Forewarned is forearmed.
那好吧！够了乌云。让我们谈谈地图的一线希望。
Alrighty then! Enough with the dark clouds. Let’s talk about the map’s silver linings.
贯穿我所有作品（包括我之前的三本书）的一个主题是，我们在历史上的特殊时刻——全球化的消退——只不过是一个短暂的过渡时期。可以说是一个空位期。随着旧的让位于新的，这样的历史时期以其不稳定而闻名。英德竞争和冷战之间的空档包括世界大战和大萧条。法德竞争和英德竞争之间的空位包括拿破仑。当旧结构倒塌，或“仅仅”在面对极端挑战时坚持不懈，东西就坏了。很多东西。
A running theme through all my work, including my three previous books, is that our particular point in history—the unwinding of globalization—is little more than a momentary transition period. An interregnum, as it were. Such historical periods are (in)famous for their instability as the old gives way to the new. The interregnum between the British-German competition and the Cold War included the world wars and the Great Depression. The interregnum between the French-German competition and the British-German competition included Napoleon. When old structures fall, or “merely” persevere in the face of extreme challenge, stuff breaks. Lots of stuff.
2020 年代和 2030 年代对许多人来说将是极其不舒服的，但这也会过去。最棒的是，我们已经可以看到太阳开始穿过云层燃烧。需要考虑的几件事：
The 2020s and 2030s will be exceedingly uncomfortable for many, but this too will pass. Best of all, we can already see the sun starting to burn through the clouds. A few things to consider:
资本可用性是人口统计的函数。婴儿潮一代在 2020 年代大规模退休对我们不利。他们正在服用他们的钱。但到 2040 年，最年轻的千禧一代将年满 40 岁，他们的钱将再次充实整个系统。
Capital availability is a function of demographics. The Boomer generation’s mass retirement in the 2020s is to our detriment. They are taking their money with them. But by 2040, the youngest Millennials will be in their forties, and their money will have made the system flush once more.
在人口统计方面，2040 年代将同时出现两个有益的结果。最年轻的千禧一代的孩子将进入劳动力市场，预示着美国劳动力市场将回归“正常”状态。几乎同样重要的是，墨西哥的人口结构将有点像烟囱，类似于 2000 年的美国。那是美国的一个神奇时刻，我们拥有相似数量的儿童、年轻工人和成熟工人，这使得美国资本丰富，消费者丰富，生产力丰富，同时仍有下一代可以计划和希望。¡墨西哥万岁！
On the topic of demographics, the 2040s will host two simultaneous beneficial outcomes. The kids of the youngest Millennials will be entering the workforce, heralding a sort of a return to “normal” for the American labor market. Nearly as important, Mexico’s demographic structure will be shaped a bit like a chimney, similar to that of the United States in 2000. That was a magic moment in America when we had a similar number of children and young workers and mature workers, making the United States capital rich and consumer rich and productivity rich while still having a future generation to plan and hope for. ¡Viva Mexico!
从现在到 2040 年，美国的再工业化将完成。事实证明，墨西哥裔美国人的联系比美国与其北方邻国所取得的任何成就都更加紧密和重要。大多数美国炼油厂将使用北美生产的原油，而不是大陆外的进口原油。工厂规模迅速扩大一倍所带来的通货膨胀和系统性压力将成为过去。我们看待去全球化冲击的方式与我们看待 2007 年次贷危机的方式大致相同：只不过是一段令人不安的记忆。2040 年代应该是在北美的好时机。
Between now and 2040, America’s reindustrialization will be complete. Mexican-American linkages will prove to be far tighter and far more consequential than anything the United States ever achieved with its northern neighbor. Most American refineries will be using North American–produced crude rather than extracontinental imports. The inflation and systemic stress that come from quickly doubling your industrial plant will be firmly in the past. We’ll think of the deglobalization shock in much the same way we think of the 2007 subprime crisis: as little more than an uncomfortable memory. The 2040s should be a great time to be in North America.
同样到 2040 年，农业社区将解决精准农业技术的所有问题。数字、基因、自动化和工程进步的结合将使美国农民的热量输出增加三倍。我们可能仍在手工采摘樱桃和芦笋，但自动化将成为食品生产和加工的几乎所有其他方面的规则。仅仅抹去东半球 2020 年代和 2030 年代粮食短缺恐怖的记忆是不够的，但这些进步以及更多进步共同提供了向前发展的稳定基线。
Also by 2040, the agricultural community will have worked all the kinks out of precision farming techniques. A mix of digital, genetic, automation, and engineering advances will have enabled American farmers to triple their caloric output. We may still well be picking cherries and asparagus by hand, but automation will be the rule in nearly every other aspect of food production and processing. It will not be enough to erase the memory of the Eastern Hemisphere’s food shortage horrors of the 2020s and 2030s, but collectively these advances and more will provide a stable baseline moving forward.
甚至有远高于平均水平的希望，我们将在材料科学方面取得巨大进步，这足以让我们拥有比锂电池更好的电池，以及远超远距离的电力传输能力。将它与事实上，2040 年代将是大多数燃烧天然气的发电设施准备退役的十年。旧的可信赖的化石燃料设施被淘汰，新的可信赖的绿色技术系统被引入。希望——我有偶数的所有东西在我打字时都被划掉了——这些新技术的价格点将被证明足够低，以至于它们可以在整个地球。我们最终将能够开始真正的能源转型。
There’s even a far-better-than-average hope we will have made massive strides in materials science, which should prove sufficient to land us with both better batteries than ones composed of lithium, as well as far superior long-range electricity transmission capacity. Pair that with the fact that the 2040s will be the decade when most natural-gas-burning, electricity-generating facilities will be ready for retirement. Old trusty fossil fuel facilities out, new trusty greentech systems in. Hopefully—and everything I have an even number of is crossed as I type this—the price points for these new technologies will prove low enough that they can be applied en masse across the globe. We will finally be able to begin the real energy transition.
也许最重要的是，以上假设很多事情都不太顺利。. . 出色地。这本书的大部分内容——我所有书籍的大部分内容——记录了未来历史中不太好的部分。崩溃资本和农业和文化。骨折运输制造与全国。但北美大陆在地理和人口方面都与即将到来的混乱截然不同。它将既是过去时代成果的储存库，也是未来时代的实验室。
Perhaps best of all, the above assumes that a great many things do not go very . . . well. Much of this book—much of all my books—chronicles the not-very-well bits of future history that lie ahead. Collapses capital and agricultural and cultural. Fractures transport and manufacturing and national. But the North American continent stands apart both geographically and demographically from much of the approaching chaos. It will serve as both a repository of the gains of ages past and a laboratory for the age to come.
真正的问题——真正的奥秘——是接下来会发生什么？在人类历史上，前所未有的空位期摧毁了地球上如此广阔地区的如此多的国家和文化。即使是晚期青铜时代的崩溃也没有那么彻底。我们将 20 世纪称为“美国世纪”，因为美国在 1945 年成为全球主导者。在未来的时代，北美与世界大部分地区之间的差距将更加明显。在人类历史上，上一个时代的头号强国在下一个时代之初以如此无懈可击的统治地位出现，这在以往从未有过。
The real question—the real mystery—is what happens then? Never before in human history has an interregnum smashed so many countries and cultures across such a wide swath of the planet. Even the Late Bronze Age Collapse wasn’t so complete. We called the twentieth century “the American Century” because the United States emerged globally predominant in 1945. In the coming age, the gap between North America and the bulk of the world will be, if anything, starker. Never before in human history has the premier power from the previous era emerged so unassailably dominant at the beginning of the next.
挑战和机遇在召唤。文化。经济的。技术性的。气候。人口统计。地缘政治。探索那个未来——探索那个勇敢的新世界——将是一个地狱般的项目。
Challenges and opportunities beckon. Cultural. Economic. Technological. Climatic. Demographic. Geopolitical. Exploring that future—exploring that brave new world—will be a hell of a project.
也许这就是我接下来要做的。
Maybe that’s what I’ll do next.
致谢
Acknowledgments
这是一个大工程。至少在过去的五年里，我一直在零零碎碎地编写文本，而且我职业生涯中的一切绝对都以大大小小的、响亮的和微妙的方式为它做出了贡献。
This was a big project. I’ve been working on the text in bits and pieces for at least the past five years, and absolutely everything in my professional career has contributed to it in ways big and small, loud and subtle.
这意味着这不是我的全部工作。不是由一个长镜头。我与其说是站在前人的肩膀上，不如说是站在大家的肩膀上。我的工作涉及一切。不仅仅是交通、金融、能源、制造业、工业商品和农业的来龙去脉，而是一切。如果我引用以某种方式为这项工作提供信息或做出贡献的每个人，参考书目将比您刚刚阅读的整个文本更长。
Which means this isn’t all my work. Not by a long shot. I’m not so much standing on the shoulders of the giants who have come before as standing on everyone’s shoulders. My work touches everything. And not just the ins and outs of transport and finance and energy and manufacturing and industrial commodities and agriculture, but everything. If I cited everyone who in some way has informed or contributed to this work, the bibliography would be longer than the entire text you just soldiered through.
也就是说，对本书的某些贡献比其他贡献更为平等。所以，请允许我说一些特别热情的感谢。
That said, some contributions to this book have been more equal than others. So, please allow me to slather on some particularly effusive thanks.
让我们从负责制表和更新有关大国中最大国的详细信息的人员开始：美国。无限感谢美国交通局和美国陆军工程兵团提供的信息，从公路和铁路运输统计数据到美国河流运输网络的地图和维护！感谢美国的各个港口当局，它们不仅促进了美国在海上贸易中的地理优势，而且还分享了它们拥有的统计数据和见解。
Let’s start with the people responsible for tabulating and updating details about the biggest of the big: the United States. Endless thank-yous to the U.S. Bureau of Transportation and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for the information on everything from road and rail transport statistics to the maps—and upkeep!—of the U.S. river-based transport network. Gratitude to America’s various Port Authorities not only for promoting the United States’ geographical advantages in maritime trade but for sharing trade the statistics and insights they have.
我特别喜欢美国劳工部的工作人员，尤其是劳工统计局的数字处理人员，以及美国联邦储备委员会和美国国税局，因为他们对内部运作的宝贵见解. . . 工作。世界上最大的经济体和全球贸易的支柱货币并不是一件容易量化的事情，我很感激他们为我们做了很多繁重的工作。
I’m a particular fan of the folks at the U.S. Department of Labor, especially the number crunchers at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as well as the U.S. Federal Reserve and the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, for their invaluable insights into the inner workings of . . . work. The largest economy in the world and the mainstay currency of global trade aren’t easy things to quantify, and I’m thankful that they do much of the heavy lifting for us.
人口统计是我地缘政治理解的重要组成部分。我欠了联合国人口司和美国人口普查局的奇才们一大笔脑细胞债。它们提供的不仅仅是简单的美国或全球人口统计，还提供关于各个社会的构成、历史趋势和未来预测的可靠、高质量的信息。简而言之，他们收集并维护关于“我们”的数据。
Demographics is a key component of my geopolitical understandings. I owe a huge debt of brain cells saved to the wizards at the UN Population Division and the U.S. Census Bureau. Offering so much more than just a simple count of the American or global populations, they provide reliable, quality information on the makeup of individual societies, historical trends, and future projections. Simply put, they collect and maintain the data on “us.”
为人口统计数据添加背景和风味的是一大堆国际国家机构和非营利组织。我的团队与很多人交谈并依赖他们，但特别感谢加拿大统计局、日本统计局、韩国统计局、欧盟统计局和澳大利亚统计局的帮助和响应。您的员工孜孜不倦地收集有关您所在国家/地区运作方式的信息，我们感谢您坦率和愿意参与我们的许多信息请求——即使是在您无法提供我们正在寻找的信息的罕见、痛苦的情况下。
Adding context and flavor to the demographic data are a whole host of international state agencies and nonprofit organizations. My team has conversed with and relied upon oh so many, but a special call-out to the helpfulness and responsiveness of Statistics Canada, the Statistics Bureau of Japan, Statistics Korea, Eurostat, and the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Your employees work tirelessly to compile information on how things work in your respective countries, and we appreciate the candor and willingness to engage with our many information requests—even in the rare, painful instances where you couldn’t provide what we were looking for.
特别感谢 Richard Hokenson——多年前他的工作让我走上了将人口统计学与经济学结合起来的道路——还有 Paul Morland 撰写了《人类潮汐》，这可以说是有史以来关于人口统计学、历史和国家实力交叉的最好的书。
Special thanks to Richard Hokenson—whose work started me down the road to marrying demographics to economics so many years ago—and Paul Morland for writing The Human Tide, arguably the best book ever on the intersection of demographics, history, and national power.
如果您发现自己需要对与能量相关的理论进行压力测试，马尼托巴大学的 Vaclav Smil 可为您提供一站式服务。这不太对。这家伙写的关于能量现实的书比我的袜子还多，我的袜子游戏也轻而易举地超过了加拿大总理。他的作品对这个项目最有用：能源与文明：全球化的历史和主要推动者。霍夫斯特拉大学的让-保罗·罗德里格 (Jean-Paul Rodrigue) 也很有帮助，他是《交通系统地理学》( The Geography of Transport Systems ) 的作者，这无疑是我读过的关于信息与页面比率的最密集的书籍。
If you ever find yourself needing to stress test an energy-related theory, Vaclav Smil of the University of Manitoba serves as a one-stop shop. That’s not quite right. The guy has written more books on the reality of energy than I have socks, and my sock game handily exceeds that of the Canadian prime minister. His works most useful to this project: Energy and Civilization: A History and Prime Movers of Globalization. Similarly helpful is Jean-Paul Rodrigue of Hofstra University, the author of The Geography of Transport Systems, far and away the densest book on an information-to-page ratio that I have ever perused.
需要能源数据？如果没有美国能源信息署，您将无处可去，该机构提供从常规和页岩生产到炼油厂产量到历史电力生产数据再到威斯康星州生物质发电中使用了多少木材的所有统计数据。
Need energy data? No way you are getting anywhere without the U.S. Energy Information Agency, which provides statistics on everything from conventional and shale production to refinery output to historical electricity production data to how much wood is used in biomass power generation in Wisconsin.
在美国海岸之外，国际能源署、BP世界能源统计评论、联合国联合石油数据库倡议和欧佩克提供了有关全球生产和消费趋势的宝贵见解。跟踪能源统计数据的方法与跟踪能源统计数据的机构一样多，但这些资源背后的团队提供了令人信服的燃料来源调查。. . 一切。
Beyond American shores, the International Energy Agency, the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, the UN’s Joint Oil Database Initiative, and OPEC provide invaluable insights into global production and consumption trends. There are as many ways of tracking energy statistics as there are bodies that track them, but the teams behind these resources provide a compelling look into what fuels . . . everything.
非常感谢 Xcel Energy 和 Southern Company 的团队在交流功能性电力系统的来龙去脉、是和否方面所做的努力和耐心。（电是硬的！）
Much appreciation to the teams at Xcel Energy and Southern Company for their efforts—and patience—in communicating the ins and outs and yeses and nos of what does and does not make for a functional power system. (Electricity is hard!)
对物质比对电子更感兴趣？然后是您生活中需要的美国地质调查局和国家矿产信息中心。两人不仅追踪几乎所有可开采资源的国内和国际生产，还追踪它们的用途。
More interested in stuff than electrons? Then it’s the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Minerals Information Center that you need in your life. The pair not only track domestic and international production of nearly every minable resource, but also their uses.
关于农业和制造业的问题仅受世界对食品和东西的胃口的限制，您可以尽情享用来自世界银行、国际清算银行、经济合作与发展组织、联合国商品贸易统计数据库、食品贸易委员会的信息自助餐和联合国农业组织、IBISWorld 和麻省理工学院经济复杂性观察站。总的来说，他们密切关注伴随人类体验而来的所有无数微小和巨大的事物和价格标签。特别感谢 Farm Credit 的每个人以及美国农业部的经济研究服务处，尤其是 Nathan Childs 和 Michael McConnell，感谢他们的慷慨解囊。
Questions on agriculture and manufacturing are limited only by the world’s appetite for food and stuff, and you can feast on a buffet of information from the World Bank, the Bank of International Settlements, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, UN Comtrade, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, IBISWorld, and MIT’s Observatory of Economic Complexity. Collectively, they keep tabs on all the myriad tiny and enormous things and price tags that accompany the human experience. Special thanks to everyone at Farm Credit as well as the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service, and especially Nathan Childs and Michael McConnell for the graciousness of their time.
埃里克·斯诺德格拉斯——对你来说就是斯诺德格拉斯博士——是一名气象学家，后来成为大学教授，后来又成为农业经济学家，他恰好是一个非常搞笑的人。除了每次在他面前都让我大吃一惊之外，他还负责让我思考我们可以预测什么和不能预测气候变化，以及几十年现有数据记录支持的可观察趋势是如何发生的。已经玩出来了。特别是，农业部分中澳大利亚与伊利诺伊州的比较无疑是他的。
Eric Snodgrass—that’s Dr. Snodgrass to you—is a meteorologist turned college professor turned agricultural economist who just happens to be freakin’ hilarious. In addition to making me bust a gut every time I’m in his presence, he is the guy responsible for much of my thinking on what we can and cannot predict about climate change, and how observable trends backed by decades of existing data records are already playing out. In particular, the Australia versus Illinois comparison within the agriculture section is undeniably his.
离家近一点：
A bit closer to home:
当团队结束《世界尽头》的工作时，我们聘请了一位新研究员——奎因·卡特——他很快就开始做肮脏的事情，告诉我我哪里错了。呃呃。欢迎来到疯狂的火车，奎因！
As the team was closing down work on The End of the World we took on a new researcher—Quinn Carter—who quickly got down to the dirty business of telling me how I’m wrong. Grrrr. Welcome to the crazy train, Quinn!
梅丽莎·泰勒 (Melissa Taylor) 担任了我的研究主管六年。在开始她人生的下一章之前，她的最后一个项目是为本书的运输部分整理草稿。想到如果没有她，那一章会是什么样子，我就不寒而栗。想到如果没有她，我最近的很多工作会是什么样子，我就不寒而栗。
Melissa Taylor served as my head of research for six years. One of her last projects before moving on to her life’s next chapter was to assemble the base draft for what evolved into this book’s transport section. I shiver at the thought of what that chapter would have looked like without her. I shiver at the thought of what a lot of my recent work would have looked like without her.
Adam Smith 多年来一直在处理我的图形需求。虽然我非常欣赏他让一切变得明亮和时髦的能力，但他为我的客户和读者提供的服务更为出色。他的常识往往是我忙碌散乱的头脑与正常人之间的第一道防线。他保护你免受太多的伤害。
Adam Smith has been handling my graphic needs for years. While I’m hugely appreciative of his ability to make everything bright and snazzy, an even greater service is the one he provides to my clients and readers. His common sense is often the first line of defense between my busy, scattered mind and normal people. He protects you from soooooooo much.
韦恩沃特斯和我已经在一起十八年了，在同志时代比乔拜登还长。共鸣板和灵魂伴侣，最好的朋友和簿记员，我无法想象没有他的生活。他可能不是图书团队的直接成员，但如果没有他，我就不会是图书团队的直接成员。
Wayne Watters and I have been together for eighteen years now, which in gay years is longer than Joe Biden has been alive. Sounding board and soulmate, best friend and bookkeeper, I can’t imagine my life without him in it. He may not have been a direct part of the book team, but without him I would not have been a direct part of the book team.
托马斯·伦奎斯特 (Thomas Rehnquist) 在我们处于世界末日的中期来来去去，但在他与我们在一起的几个月里，他引起了严重的轰动。除了处理主要事实核查外，Tom 的工作还为整个工业商品章节提供了支柱。我很高兴/很生气地说他的工作让我免于出丑。
Thomas Rehnquist came and went while we were mid–End of the World, but in his few months with us he made a seriously oversized splash. In addition to handling the primary fact-check, Tom’s work provided the backbone for the entire industrial commodities chapters. I’m happy/angry to say his work has kept me from making an oversized fool of myself.
苏珊科普兰是。. . 关于苏珊，我能说些什么？十五年来，我一直以某种身份与她共事。从技术上讲，她是我的管理员，但远不止于此。她是组织和情感上的结缔组织，让我们所有人都在 Zeihan 的地缘政治上保持安全和理智。我很幸运，她还没有感到无聊。
Susan Copeland is . . . what can I say about Susan? I’ve been working with her in some capacity for fifteen years. Technically, she’s my admin, but so much more than that. She’s the organizational and emotional connective tissue that keeps all of us here at Zeihan on Geopolitics safe and sane. I’m so blessed that she hasn’t yet gotten bored.
最后但同样重要的是，Michael Nayebi-Oskoui。我和迈克尔一起工作了十多年。这是他帮助我完成的第三本书。他已经不仅仅是我的参谋长了。很高兴看到他演变成一个同样多才多艺、疲惫不堪的分析师像我一样。没有他，农业部门就不可能出现，他提供了许多使金融和制造业成为可能的智力脚手架。
Last, but most certainly not least, Michael Nayebi-Oskoui. I’ve worked with Michael for more than a decade now. This is the third book he’s helped me with. He’s become more than my chief of staff. It has been a pleasure to watch him evolve into a just as versatile and frazzled analyst as me. The agriculture section flat-out could not have happened without him, and he provided much of the intellectual scaffolding that made finance and manufacturing possible as well.
我非常感谢 Harper Business 的所有人——最著名的是 Eric Nelson 和 James Neidhardt——他们允许我在最后一刻做出一些调整和补充（比如这篇笔记）来解决迟到的问题——突破发展。您在文本中的任何地方看到对乌克兰战争或 2022 年 2 月的提及都是出于他们的灵活性。考虑到我知道已经发生的剧变规模，这些变化还远远不够，但是，考虑到我们的生产和后勤限制，我对我们能够包含的更新感到非常兴奋。
I have nothing but bottomless thanks to all the folks at Harper Business—most notably Eric Nelson and James Neidhardt—for allowing me to make some well-past-the-last-minute adjustments and additions (such as this note) to address late-breaking developments. Anywhere in the text you see a reference to the Ukraine War or February 2022 is courtesy of their flexibility. Those changes are nowhere near sufficient, considering the scale of upheaval I know to be already in progress, but, considering our production and logistical constraints, I’m thrilled with the updates we were able to include.
最后要感谢您，读者（或听众，如果您是 Kindle Krowd 的一员）。无论您是在使用我的书来帮助您做出生活和商业决策，还是只是在寻找机会证明我是错误的，我衷心感谢您的陪伴。作为告别礼物，我想向您介绍我的网站。与其说那里有你可以注册的时事通讯（虽然有），倒不如说本书中的所有图形都可以在那里找到高清和全彩色的。前往 www.zeihan.com/end-of-the-world-maps，您会发现它们处于 Adam 想要的完全荣耀中。
One final thanks to you, the reader (or listener if you’re part of the Kindle Krowd). Whether you’re using my book to help inform your life and business decisions or simply looking for opportunities to prove me wrong, I heartily appreciate having you along for the ride. As a good-bye gift, I’d like to point you to my website. It isn’t so much that there’s a newsletter there you can sign up for (although there is), but instead that all the graphics from within this book can be found there in high definition and full color. Head to www.zeihan.com/end-of-the-world-maps and you will find them in the full glory in which Adam intended.
而且，正如他们所说，就是这样。
And, that, as they say, is that.
指数
Index
此数字版本的特定分页形式已经开发出来，以匹配创建索引的印刷版本。如果您正在阅读本文的应用程序支持此功能，则此索引中注明的页面引用应该对齐。然而，目前并非所有数字设备都支持此功能。因此，我们鼓励您使用设备的搜索功能来查找特定条目。
A specific form of pagination for this digital edition has been developed to match the print edition from which the index was created. If the application you are reading this on supports this feature, the page references noted in this index should align. At this time, however, not all digital devices support this functionality. Therefore, we encourage you to please use your device’s search capabilities to locate a specific entry.
农业：畜牧业，457；气候变化和，442-56；能源和，408；出口，416-17；财务和，412-15；“全球”，51；增长投入，413；进口，417-23；工业商品和，409-12；工业时代, 44, 396; 工业技术和，403；木材和，380；制造和 404-6；大规模中耕作物，405、436；前工业时代，425-26；原材料，413；里弗莱恩，13；久坐不动的农业，10-17；刀耕火种，462；运输和，406-8
agriculture: animal husbandry and, 457; climate change and, 442–56; energy and, 408; exporting, 416–17; finance and, 412–15; “global,” 51; growth inputs, 413; importing, 417–23; industrial commodities and, 409–12; Industrial Era, 44, 396; industrial technologies and, 403; lumber and, 380; manufacturing and, 404–6; mass row crops, 405, 436; preindustrial, 425–26; raw stock, 413; riverine, 13; sedentary agriculture, 10–17; slash-and-burn, 462; transport and, 406–8
铝、65、186、293–95、300、311、313、436
aluminum, 65, 186, 293–95, 300, 311, 313, 436
美国：农业，428；美国世纪，366；美国气候图，452；美国金融模式，190-94；美国更多，91-103；美国革命，27 岁；美国的能源故事，Pt。我（图表），242；美国的能源故事，Pt。II（图表），243；铝土矿，295；婴儿潮一代，91-93 岁；深水动力，31-32；水力压裂法，192–93；X 世代，93–94 岁；地理差异，343；全球石油市场，行动，229；房屋半身像，191-92；伊利诺伊州，气候变化和，444-46；工业电力，32-35；产业化经验，329；地面力量，25-30；锂，300；木材，380-81；制造业，327、334、343–47；千禧一代，94 岁；核电，315；磷酸盐，410；一战后的货币状况，174-78；后置油系统，252；石英，314；稀土元素，310；河流力量，25-30；大豆，433；钢，293；2022 年石油产量，239–44；工资变动，343；风，450–51；没有订单安全，152；二战，36–39，91；缩放器，94
America: agriculture, 428; American Century, 366; American Climate chart, 452; American financial model, 190–94; American more, 91–103; American Revolution, 27; America’s Energy Story, Pt. I (chart), 242; America’s Energy Story, Pt. II (chart), 243; bauxite, 295; Boomer generation, 91–93; deepwater power, 31–32; fracking, 192–93; Generation X, 93–94; geographic variation of, 343; global oil market, actions for, 229; housing bust of, 191–92; Illinois, climate change and, 444–46; industrial power, 32–35; industrialization experience of, 329; land power, 25–30; lithium, 300; lumber, 380–81; manufacturing, 327, 334, 343–47; Millennials, 94; nuclear power, 315; phosphates, 410; post-WWI currency situation, 174–78; post-Order oil system, 252; quartz, 314; rare earth elements, 310; river power, 25–30; soy, 433; steel, 293; 2022 oil production, 239–44; wage variation, 343; winds, 450–51; without Order security, 152; WWII, 36–39, 91; Zoomers, 94
安哥拉, 229, 244, 255, 368
Angola, 229, 244, 255, 368
畜牧业，399、413、435、457–58
animal husbandry, 399, 413, 435, 457–58
苹果, 28, 398, 466
apples, 28, 398, 466
阿根廷：农业，404、416、428、465、466；气候变化，447、451；人口统计数据，67；工业时代，153；锂，300；制造业, 372–73, 379；石油，后订单，252；大豆，433；小麦，402
Argentina: agriculture, 404, 416, 428, 465, 466; climate change and, 447, 451; demographics of, 67; Industrial Age, 153; lithium, 300; manufacturing, 372–73, 379; oil, post-Order, 252; soy, 433; wheat, 402
亚洲：亚洲金融模式，179-87；金融危机，251；食品进口，152；即时库存，366；制造业，154、335–36、351–56、362；价格通胀，381；大米和，437；智能手机和 383；367系统；工资变化，343
Asia: Asian financial model, 179–87; financial crises of, 251; food imports and, 152; just-in-time inventorying, 366; manufacturing, 154, 335–36, 351–56, 362; price inflation, 381; rice and, 437; smartphones and, 383; system of, 367; wage variation in, 343
阿塔卡马沙漠, 285, 296
Atacama Desert, 285, 296
澳大利亚：农业，405、428；铝土矿，294；气候变化和，444-45；钴，298；信用，206；工业商品，353；铁，291；锂，300；镍，311；石油生产，255；石英，314；稀土元素，310；安全，订购后，148、156–57；东南亚，369；钢，293；锌, 317
Australia: agriculture, 405, 428; bauxite, 294; climate change and, 444–45; cobalt, 298; credit, 206; industrial commodities, 353; iron, 291; lithium, 300; nickel, 311; oil production, 255; quartz, 314; rare earth elements, 310; security, post-Order, 148, 156–57; Southeast Asia, 369; steel, 293; zinc, 317
按作物划分的平均生产率和投入成本（图表），414
Average Productivity and Cost of Inputs by Crop (chart), 414
阿塞拜疆, 230, 235–36, 252, 419
Azerbaijan, 230, 235–36, 252, 419
圆珠笔，355n
ball-point pen, 355n
孟加拉国, 53, 56, 61, 323–24, 419, 449
Bangladesh, 53, 56, 61, 323–24, 419, 449
大麦, 165–66, 168, 401, 429
barley, 165–66, 168, 401, 429
电池, 272–74, 278, 297–301, 304–5, 311, 316
batteries, 272–74, 278, 297–301, 304–5, 311, 316
铝土矿, 149, 152, 294–95
bauxite, 149, 152, 294–95
牛肉，460–61
beef, 460–61
白俄罗斯, 402, 404, 406, 411, 416
Belarus, 402, 404, 406, 411, 416
比利时, 60, 148, 314, 340–41, 356, 404, 419
Belgium, 60, 148, 314, 340–41, 356, 404, 419
节育，49
birth control, 49
出生率：中国，352，473；崩溃，避免，67；按国家分类，55–56, 60；德国，47 岁；全球化，52；工业化和, 102, 473; 千禧一代和 95 岁；冷战后，54、55；urbanization and, 44, 50, 102, 200, 473。另见人口统计
birth rates: China, 352, 473; collapse of, avoidance of, 67; by country, 55–56, 60; Germany, 47; globalization and, 52; industrialization and, 102, 473; Millennials and, 95; post–Cold War and, 54, 55; urbanization and, 44, 50, 102, 200, 473. See also demographics
玻利维亚、171、173、202、285、288、404、453
Bolivia, 171, 173, 202, 285, 288, 404, 453
婴儿潮一代，91–93 岁，473 岁
Boomer generation, 91–93, 473
巴西，207–8；农业, 405, 428; 铝土矿，294；全球化，367；重型车辆制造，379；工业商品，353；铁，291；制造，未来，368；石油生产，254；大豆, 433, 435–36
Brazil, 207–8; agriculture, 405, 428; bauxite, 294; globalization and, 367; heavy vehicle manufacturing, 379; industrial commodities, 353; iron, 291; manufacturing, future of, 368; oil production, 254; soy, 433, 435–36
布雷顿森林体系，37、39–40、176–78、176n、229、366
Bretton Woods, 37, 39–40, 176–78, 176n, 229, 366
英国：脱欧，205；英属印度，76–77；欧洲金融危机，189；工业化和，328；制造业, 327, 341; 材料采购，285；重商主义，76；石油，波斯 226–27；石油，后订单，252；英镑, 174; 铁路，118；行间作物农业，405；斯堪的纳维亚和 359；安全、后订单、148、150；纺织品、鲸油和 223–24
Britain: Brexit, 205; British Raj, 76–77; European financial crisis and, 189; industrialization and, 328; manufacturing, 327, 341; material acquisition, 285; mercantilism, 76; oil, Persia 226–27; oil, post-Order, 252; pound, 174; railroads, 118; row-crop agriculture, 405; Scandinavia and, 359; security, post-Order, 148, 150; textiles, whale oil and, 223–24
青铜时代，167、281、456、475
Bronze Age, 167, 281, 456, 475
保加利亚，欧洲经济体系，316、340、356、404–5、417
Bulgaria, European economic system, 316, 340, 356, 404–5, 417
混乱中的热量和肥料外交（图表），420
Caloric and Fertilizer Diplomacy in the Disorder (chart), 420
加拿大：农业，404、428；牛肉，460；甜菜糖，463；大英帝国和，120；加拿大石油产量（图表），240；钴，297；电力，295；食品出口，416；全球化，52；黄金，174；政府, 98; 绿色科技，265；铁，292；木材，380；北美自由贸易协定，343；镍，311；石油，239、252、257；人口，34、60、95；钾肥，411；石英，314；社会主义，71；向日葵和油菜，466；贸易，156、343、361；2022年石油产量，239；小麦，466
Canada: agriculture, 404, 428; beef, 460; beet sugar, 463; British Empire and, 120; Canadian Oil Production (chart), 240; cobalt, 297; electricity, 295; food exports, 416; globalization, 52; gold, 174; government of, 98; greentech, 265; iron, 292; lumber, 380; NAFTA, 343; nickel, 311; oil, 239, 252, 257; population, 34, 60, 95; potash, 411; quartz, 314; socialism, 71; sunflowers and canola, 466; trade, 156, 343, 361; 2022 oil production, 239; wheat, 466
帽，459-60
CAP, 459–60
资本管制，212-13
capital controls, 212–13
资本外逃, 197, 212–13, 215, 371, 414
capital flight, 197, 212–13, 215, 371, 414
资本主义, 70, 72–74, 78, 217
capitalism, 70, 72–74, 78, 217
智利：农业，417、466；阿塔卡马沙漠，285、296；铜，296；61 岁的人口统计数据；葡萄，465；greentech 和 288；锂, 272, 278, 300; 石英，314
Chile: agriculture, 417, 466; Atacama Desert, 285, 296; copper, 296; demographics of, 61; grapes, 465; greentech and, 288; lithium, 272, 278, 300; quartz, 314
中国：农业，409、423；铝，294；美国制裁，361；亚洲金融模式，183-87；铝土矿，294；钴，297；铜，296；信用，209；103–4、351–52 的人口统计数据；饥荒，缓解，425-26；法定货币时代，183-87；第一岛链，订单后安全性，140-41；德国，和，357, 385–86；黄金，303；重型车辆制造，379；工业材料，289；铁，291-92；青铜时代晚期的崩溃，167；铅，305；贷款占 GDP 的百分比，185；锂，300；制造业，337–40、354–55、360、374–75；重商主义，76；镍，311；核电，315；石油进口，353；一带一路计划，186；磷酸盐，410；人口下降，351-52；订单后安全，148-50；期票，169；质量和价值量表，337；石英，314；降雨量, 448; 稀土元素，309-10；俄罗斯知识产权，367；半导体，382；硅，312；银，301；太阳能电池板，313；运输，158-59；西方消费，335-36；元，价值，196-97；锌, 317
China: agriculture, 409, 423; aluminum, 294; American sanctions on, 361; Asian financial model, 183–87; bauxite, 294; cobalt, 297; copper, 296; credit, 209; demographics of, 103–4, 351–52; famine, mitigation of, 425–26; fiat currency era, 183–87; First Island Chain, post-Order security, 140–41; Germany, and, 357, 385–86; gold, 303; heavy vehicle manufacturing, 379; industrial materials, 289; iron, 291–92; Late Bronze Age Collapse, 167; lead, 305; lending as percentage of GDP, 185; lithium, 300; manufacturing, 337–40, 354–55, 360, 374–75; mercantilism, 76; nickel, 311; nuclear power, 315; oil imports of, 353; One Belt One Road program, 186; phosphates, 410; population drop, 351–52; post-Order security, 148–50; promissory notes, 169; quality and value scale, 337; quartz, 314; rainfall, 448; rare earth elements, 309–10; Russian intellectual property, 367; semiconductors, 382; silicon, 312; silver, 301; solar panels, 313; transport, 158–59; Western consumption and, 335–36; yuan, value of, 196–97; zinc, 317
柑橘, 401, 402, 431, 465
citrus, 401, 402, 431, 465
文明：文明混乱，166；167 的秋天；前三个，163-68、394-95；米尔斯，408；石油和, 222, 248; 组织，64；河流，14–15
civilization: civilizational chaos, 166; fall of, 167; first three, 163–68, 394–95; mills, 408; oil and, 222, 248; organization, 64; rivers, 14–15
文明与科技（图表），397
Civilization and Technology (chart), 397
气候变化, 262–76, 442–56
climate change, 262–76, 442–56
煤，225；澳大利亚，369；英国, 43, 117; 哥伦比亚，366；衍生品，326；ECSC，286；食物和，13；工业革命，21, 43；甲烷，225；天然气，259；与核电相比，315；该命令以及，442；后全球化世界，442；后订单, 275, 289; 鲁尔区和，328；硅，312；蒸汽和，120；钢，292–93；特斯拉电池，300
coal, 225; Australia, 369; Britain, 43, 117; Colombia, 366; derivatives, 326; ECSC, 286; food and, 13; Industrial Revolution and, 21, 43; methane, 225; natural gas, 259; nuclear power compared to, 315; the Order and, 442; post-globalized world, 442; post-Order, 275, 289; Ruhr region and, 328; silicon, 312; steam and, 120; steel, 292–93; Tesla battery, 300
钴, 152, 297–99
cobalt, 152, 297–99
可可, 149, 168, 466–67
cocoa, 149, 168, 466–67
哥伦比亚，206–7、253、255、364–66、417
Colombia, 206–7, 253, 255, 364–66, 417
共同农业政策，459–60
Common Agricultural Policy, 459–60
共产主义，命令驱动，71-75
communism, command-driven, 71–75
混凝土, 道路, 12, 32, 111, 122, 349
concrete, roads, 12, 32, 111, 122, 349
集装箱化, 127–29, 131, 134, 153, 333, 335
containerization, 127–29, 131, 134, 153, 333, 335
铜，295–96；阿塔卡马沙漠，285、296；智利，296；中国，296；钴和，297；电力，295；第一技术，325；greentech 和 287；铁器时代，282；秘鲁，296；铂族金属 (PGM)，308；银和，301；唐代，171；锌, 316
copper, 295–96; Atacama Desert, 285, 296; Chile, 296; China, 296; cobalt and, 297; electricity, 295; first technology, 325; greentech and, 287; Iron Age and, 282; Peru, 296; platinum-group metals (PGMs), 308; silver and, 301; Tang dynasty, 171; zinc, 316
玉米, 394, 401, 404–5, 413, 427, 432–37, 458
corn, 394, 401, 404–5, 413, 427, 432–37, 458
新冠病毒。见新冠病毒
coronavirus. See COVID
棉花，464-65；美国玉米授权，434；英国和，43；内燃机和 121；棉籽油，462；埃及和, 402, 431; 印度和，43；该命令和 407；后全球化，386；价格，121；苏联和，450；鲸油和 224
cotton, 464–65; American corn mandate, 434; Britain and, 43; combustion engines and, 121; cottonseed oil, 462; Egypt and, 402, 431; India and, 43; the Order and, 407; post-globalization, 386; prices of, 121; Soviet Union and, 450; whale oil and, 224
新冠肺炎，85–88、155、189、204、215、227、323、413
COVID, 85–88, 155, 189, 204, 215, 227, 323, 413
克里米亚战争, 23, 119
Crimean War, 23, 119
加密货币，201
cryptocurrencies, 201
货币，168-79；美国和，195；倒塌，214；欧元，187–89, 194；菲亚特、亚和、182、185
currency, 168–79; America and, 195; collapses of, 214; the euro, 187–89, 194; fiat, Asia and, 182, 185
贬值, 169
debasement, 169
非文明化，66
decivilization, 66
非殖民化，228-29
decolonialization, 228–29
深水技术：落选，20；美国，31-32；时代的开始，112、113–16；欧洲、中东和 232；工业时代，23-24；互联互通，69；伦敦，20 岁；导航，17-19；传播的，47；运输期间，113-16
deepwater technology: also-rans of, 20; America, 31–32; beginning of era, 112, 113–16; Europe, Middle East and, 232; Industrial Era, 23–24; interconnectivity, 69; London, 20; navigation, 17–19; spread of, 47; transport during, 113–16
通货紧缩, 91, 213–14
deflation, 91, 213–14
人口统计：人口老龄化，200-203；农业和, 413, 431; 美国，5、89–99、101–2、104、350、367、475；亚洲，351-56；黑死病，290；婴儿潮一代，93岁，101岁；资本可用性，473；中国，59–60、141、184、197、338、351–56、422；信用和，204，211；下降，73；欧洲，143–44、189、356–58；未来和，474；国内生产总值，96；德国，80, 379；全球消费，375；全球化和，3；工业革命，42、47；日本，82–84, 186；制造业，375-77；质量整合，139；墨西哥，102、155、350、364；千禧一代，94 岁；命令，65-67；养老金和，215；不归路，473；人口年龄，73；人口崩溃，56–61；民粹主义，214；冷战后和，54-55；后全球化，61、73、201、374、474-75；俄罗斯和，80–81、97、312；转型，56；世界崩溃, 77, 79
demographics: aging populations, 200–203; agriculture and, 413, 431; America, 5, 89–99, 101–2, 104, 350, 367, 475; Asia, 351–56; Black Death, 290; Boomers, 93, 101; capital availability, 473; China, 59–60, 141, 184, 197, 338, 351–56, 422; credit and, 204, 211; decline, 73; Europe, 143–44, 189, 356–58; future and, 474; GDP and, 96; Germany, 80, 379; global consumption and, 375; globalization and, 3; Industrial Revolution, 42, 47; Japan, 82–84, 186; manufacturing, 375–77; mass integration, 139; Mexico, 102, 155, 350, 364; Millennial, 94; the Order, 65–67; pensions and, 215; point of no return, 473; population age, 73; population crash, 56–61; populism and, 214; post–Cold War and, 54–55; post-globalization, 61, 73, 201, 374, 474–75; Russia and, 80–81, 97, 312; transformation, 56; world collapse, 77, 79
去包，82–84
desourcing, 82–84
数字时代，工业化，74、290、302、309、314
Digital Age, industrialization, 74, 290, 302, 309, 314
通货紧缩，213-14
disinflation, 213–14
分配、经济模型和、45、70、130、153、223、228
distribution, economic models and, 45, 70, 130, 153, 223, 228
美元、美国和金本位制，176–78
dollar, American, and gold standard, 176–78
东亚：电池，272；中国和，146；计算组件，405；合作，140, 351, 374；成本和安全，354；新冠肺炎，87；人口统计数据，352；印度和，244；制造业，335–40、367–68、379；现代城市，155；该命令和，398；猪肉，458；订单后，407；大米，439；硅，314；小麦，401
East Asia: batteries, 272; China and, 146; computing components, 405; cooperation and, 140, 351, 374; costs and security, 354; COVID, 87; demographics of, 352; India and, 244; manufacturing, 335–40, 367–68, 379; modern cities of, 155; the Order and, 398; pork, 458; post-Order, 407; rice, 439; silicon, 314; wheat, 401
东半球交通风险（图表），151
Eastern Hemispheric Transport Risk (chart), 151
东印度公司, 43, 123
East India Company, 43, 123
埃及：古代，15、164–66、394–95；青铜时代，281；4 个城市；棉花，464；去城市化，426；帝国扩张，396；法西斯主义，72；灌溉，165、394–95；164 的自然缓冲区；油, 233, 244; 该命令，以及，53；订购后，145、244、430–31、465；罗马和，112；谢克尔，166；土耳其和，222；小麦，402
Egypt: ancient, 15, 164–66, 394–95; Bronze Age, 281; cities of, 4; cotton, 464; deurbanization, 426; empire expansion and, 396; fascism and, 72; irrigation, 165, 394–95; natural buffers of, 164; oil, 233, 244; the Order and, 53; post-Order, 145, 244, 430–31, 465; Rome and, 112; shekel, 166; Turkey and, 222; wheat, 402
电力：农业，396；美国和，90；铝土矿冶炼，295；铜，295；greentech 和 268–73、287–88、300、362；工业化，53；光和，22；锂，299；天然气，259–60；北美和，362；按需，223；后订单，277；钢和，293；时间和，22；铀和 315；布线和，386；女权运动，22；木头和，381
electricity: agriculture and, 396; America and, 90; bauxite smelting, 295; copper, 295; greentech and, 268–73, 287–88, 300, 362; industrialization and, 53; light and, 22; lithium, 299; natural gas and, 259–60; North America and, 362; on-demand, 223; post-Order, 277; steel and, 293; time and, 22; uranium and, 315; wiring and, 386; women’s rights movements, 22; wood and, 381
安然公司，190–91，194
Enron, 190–91, 194
乙醇，434
ethanol, 434
埃塞俄比亚, 11, 53, 417
Ethiopia, 11, 53, 417
欧洲：农业，405、466；铝，295；银行业危机，196；捕获程序，295；共识，472；深水技术，232；通货紧缩，214；人口统计，未来，356-57；的经济模型，187-90；143-45 的未来问题；德俄关系，80；工业时代，社会动荡，48；土地和，32；制造业，340–42、405；制造业的未来，356–60；货币扩张，196；天然气和 260、262；新技术，影响，132；油, 256, 258; 订单后安全，143-47；铁路，118
Europe: agriculture, 405, 466; aluminum, 295; banking crisis of, 196; capture programs in, 295; consensus in, 472; deepwater technologies and, 232; deflation, 214; demographics, future of, 356–57; economic model of, 187–90; future problems of, 143–45; German and Russian relations and, 80; industrial era, social unrest and, 48; land and, 32; manufacturing, 340–42, 405; manufacturing, future of, 356–60; monetary expansion and, 196; natural gas and, 260, 262; new technologies, effect on, 132; oil, 256, 258; post-Order security, 143–47; railroads in, 118
欧洲势力范围（图表），145
European Spheres of Influence (chart), 145
欧盟：通货紧缩，214；143 人的人口统计数据；去包，84；ECSC，286；欧洲煤钢共同体，286；制造能力，405；英国，144、205、363。另见欧洲
European Union: deflation and, 214; demographics of, 143; desourcing, 84; ECSC, 286; European Coal and Steel Community, 286; manufacturing capacity, 405; United Kingdom, 144, 205, 363. See also Europe
埃克森，190
Exxon, 190
饥荒，424–31
famine, 424–31
法西斯社团主义，70-74
fascist corporatism, 70–74
肥料，409-13；工业时代和 35、44、396、429；石化和, 264, 326
fertilizers, 409–13; industrial age and, 35, 44, 396, 429; petrochemicals and, 264, 326
封建制度，68-67
feudal system, 68–67
法定年龄，179-98
fiat age, 179–98
第一岛链，无秩序保障，140–141
First Island Chain, without Order security, 140–141
食品（在）安全（图表），418
Food (In)Security (chart), 418
外国直接投资 (FDI)，371
foreign direct investment (FDI), 371
四十英尺当量单位 (FEU)，128–29
forty-foot equivalent unit (FEU), 128–29
化石燃料，21；绿色科技和，268–71；工业革命，21, 326；国际贸易，442；天然气，259
fossil fuels, 21; greentech and, 268–71; Industrial Revolution and, 21, 326; internationally traded, 442; natural gas, 259
水力压裂法，193
fracking, 193
法国：农业，428；饥荒，112；重型车辆制造，379；铁，286；锂，300；制造业，341-42；重商主义，75；核电，315；油, 227, 252; 石英，314；稀土元素，310；安全，订购后，148；钢，293；瑞典和，359；运输，后订单，158
France: agriculture, 428; famine, 112; heavy vehicle manufacturing, 379; iron, 286; lithium, 300; manufacturing, 341–42; mercantilism, 75; nuclear power, 315; oil, 227, 252; quartz, 314; rare earth elements, 310; security, post-Order, 148; steel, 293; Sweden and, 359; transport, post-Order, 158
公路、铁路和水路的货运流量：2012 年（图表），348
Freight Flows by Highway, Railroad, and Waterway: 2012 (chart), 348
农业的未来（图表），455
Future of Agriculture (chart), 455
电镀，316–17
galvanization, 316–17
基因编辑，427
gene editing, 427
X 世代，93–94 岁
Generation X, 93–94
基因组学，427
genomics, 427
成功的地域，4；美国，深水动力，31-32；美国，工业强国，32-35；美国，河流和陆地力量，25-30；资本受限的世界，211；深水养殖，19-20，23；狩猎者/采集者，10-11；工业时代，23岁；河流，14-15；风，16
geographies of success, 4; America, deepwater power, 31–32; America, industrial power, 32–35; America, river and land power, 25–30; capital-constrained world, 211; deepwater cultures, 19–20, 23; hunter/gatherers, 10–11; industrial age, 23; rivers, 14–15; wind, 16
地缘政治, 2, 10, 262
geopolitics, 2, 10, 262
德国：农业，428；美国和，358；中国和，357；煤炭，286；信用，188，204-5；德国统一战争，396；重型车辆制造，379；工业化和，328；机械，385；制造业，327、340–42；重商主义，76；镍，286；订单后安全, 149, 150; 石英，314；俄罗斯和, 358
Germany: agriculture, 428; America and, 358; China and, 357; coal, 286; credit, 188, 204–5; German unification wars, 396; heavy vehicle manufacturing, 379; industrialization and, 328; machinery, 385; manufacturing, 327, 340–42; mercantilism, 76; nickel, 286; post-Order security, 149, 150; quartz, 314; Russia and, 358
全球 CO 2排放量（图表），443
Global CO2 Emissions by Emitter (chart), 443
全球能源，2019 年（图表），247
Global Energy, 2019 (chart), 247
全球化，3-4, 67, 124；农业，51-52、404-5；美国和，55、360、366；巴西，367；布雷顿森林体系，127；人口统计和，50；结束, 88, 104, 276; 工业化，135；中间品贸易，324；东亚制造业，335-40；该命令和，199；页岩革命，244；苏联，367；城市化，51；没有执法者和裁判，146
globalization, 3–4, 67, 124; agricultural, 51–52, 404–5; American and, 55, 360, 366; Brazil, 367; Bretton Woods, 127; demographics and, 50; end of, 88, 104, 276; industrialization and, 135; intermediate goods trade, 324; manufacturing in east Asia, 335–40; the Order and, 199; shale revolution and, 244; Soviet Union, 367; urbanization, 51; without an enforcer and referee, 146
全球化及其影响（图表），40
Globalization and Its Effects (chart), 40
2019 年按行业划分的全球制造业收入（图表），385
Global Manufacturing Revenue by Sector, 2019 (chart), 385
全球货币供应（图表），197
Global Money Supplies (chart), 197
全球各行业石油消费量（图表），264
Global Oil Consumption by Sector (chart), 264
全球石油出口和未来风险（图表），245
Global Oil Exports and Future Risks (chart), 245
全球太阳能潜力（图表），266
Global Solar Potential (chart), 266
全球大豆和谷物产量（图表），400
Global Soy and Grains Production (chart), 400
全球风能潜力（图表），267
Global Wind Potential (chart), 267
黄金，302–4
gold, 302–4
葡萄, 28, 394, 465
grapes, 28, 394, 465
希腊：债务，204；60 岁的人口统计数据；欧洲经济模型，188-89；全球化，53；石英，314；土耳其，419；水车, 167
Greece: debt, 204; demographics of, 60; European economic model, 188–89; globalization and, 53; quartz, 314; Turkey, 419; water wheels, 167
绿色革命，398–99、449、475
Green Revolution, 398–99, 449, 475
绿色科技，264-76；农业和，408；钴，297；锂，300；矿物质和，287-88；北美期权，362；硅，313
greentech, 264–76; agriculture and, 408; cobalt, 297; lithium, 300; minerals and, 287–88; North American options, 362; silicon, 313
升温：澳大利亚与伊利诺伊州（图表），444
Heating Up: Australia vs. Illinois (chart), 444
历史生育率（图表），49
Historic Fertility Rates (chart), 49
华为, 355, 360–61
Huawei, 355, 360–61
匈牙利, 60, 188, 205, 316, 340, 417
Hungary, 60, 188, 205, 316, 340, 417
帝国中心, 20, 68–69, 132–33
Imperial Centers, 20, 68–69, 132–33
英制：end of, 134, 228; 制造业和 327；新世界秩序，75, 123；深水前，69-70；贸易, 50, 69
imperial system: end of, 134, 228; manufacturing and, 327; new world order and, 75, 123; pre-deepwater, 69–70; trade, 50, 69
印度，208；亚洲系统和，339、370–72；铝土矿，294；牛肉，460；英属印度，76 岁；气候变化，442、449、453；布，43；棉花, 43, 465; 信贷, 202, 208; 货币，168；61 岁的人口统计数据；联邦制，98；食品出口，416、419；绿色科技，265；人体肥料，10；工业化，53；木材，381；制造业，339；制造，订单后，370–72、377、405；缅甸和，425；天然气，260；油, 244, 252; oil, post-order, 244, 252; 巴基斯坦，订购后，146；石英，314；降雨量, 449; 资源，订单后，277；大米，438；安全，订购后，143、152、154；航运和，133；烟草，463；小麦，402；锌, 317
India, 208; Asian system and, 339, 370–72; bauxite, 294; beef, 460; British Raj, 76; climate change, 442, 449, 453; cloth, 43; cotton, 43, 465; credit, 202, 208; currency, 168; demographics of, 61; federalism, 98; food export, 416, 419; greentech, 265; human fertilizer, 10; industrialization, 53; lumber, 381; manufacturing, 339; manufacturing, post-Order, 370–72, 377, 405; Myanmar and, 425; natural gas, 260; oil, 244, 252; oil, post-Order, 244, 252; Pakistan, post-Order, 146; quartz, 314; rainfall, 449; resources, post-Order, 277; rice, 438; security, post-Order, 143, 152, 154; shipping and, 133; tobacco, 463; wheat, 402; zinc, 317
印度尼西亚：中国和，339；气候变化，442、453；腐败，183；信用，207；61、352 的人口统计数据；经济崩溃，186；能源和，228；食品进口，417；绿色科技，288；日本和，372；制造业，339；制造业，未来，369–70，372；镍，311；油，255；该命令，以及，53；大米，437；东南亚圈，369-70；烟草，463；城市化，352
Indonesia: China and, 339; climate change and, 442, 453; corruption and, 183; credit, 207; demographics of, 61, 352; economic crash of, 186; energy and, 228; food imports, 417; greentech, 288; Japan and, 372; manufacturing, 339; manufacturing, future of, 369–70, 372; nickel, 311; oil, 255; the Order and, 53; rice, 437; Southeast Asian sphere, 369–70; tobacco, 463; urbanization, 352
工业化，订单和，289-90
industrialization, the Order and, 289–90
工业材料，279-320；总是材料，302-6；拆卸历史，281-85；基本材料，291-96；时髦的材料，307-10；未来材料，297-301；过去的教训，未来的教训，285-89；可靠的材料，311–18
industrial materials, 279–320; always materials, 302–6; disassembling history, 281–85; essential materials, 291–96; funky materials, 307–10; future materials, 297–301; lessons from the past, lessons for the future, 285-89; reliable materials, 311–18
工业材料（图表），318
Industrial Materials (chart), 318
工业厂房，新建，375–78
industrial plant, new, 375–78
工业革命，21-24；出生率和，49，50；英国，33, 42–46；化学品，44；中国, 33, 59; 城市规模，132；人口统计和，42；欧洲，32–33；化石燃料，325；德国，33、34、47；植物, 327; 日本，33；人口密度和，34；精密制造，326；俄罗斯，33 岁；钢，325；纺织品，42-44；小麦, 396, 399; 妇女权利运动，48
industrial revolution, 21–24; birthrates and, 49, 50; Britain, 33, 42–46; chemicals, 44; China, 33, 59; city size, 132; demographics and, 42; Europe, 32–33; fossil fuels, 325; Germany, 33, 34, 47; plants, 327; Japan, 33; population density and, 34; precision manufacturing, 326; Russia, 33; steel, 325; textiles, 42–44; wheat, 396, 399; women’s rights movement, 48
通货膨胀，213
inflation, 213
基础设施、人口和 16
infrastructure, human population and, 16
保险业，两伊战争，137–38
insurance sector, Iran-Iraq War, 137–38
中间产品, 133, 140, 154–56, 176, 324, 327, 333
intermediate goods, 133, 140, 154–56, 176, 324, 327, 333
内燃机, 1, 121, 122, 263, 288
internal combustion engines, 1, 121, 122, 263, 288
国际农业和食品贸易，1870–2000（图表），399
International Agriculture and Food Trade, 1870–2000 (chart), 399
物联网, 338, 383
Internet of Things, 338, 383
iPhone, 282, 297, 333
iPhones, 282, 297, 333
伊朗：农业，422；政变，229；人口统计学，61, 403；葡萄，465；两伊战争，137；海军，234；油，228、232、240、288；后订单，146；大米，401
Iran: agriculture of, 422; coup, 229; demographics, 61, 403; grapes, 465; Iran-Iraq War, 137; navy of, 234; oil, 228, 232, 240, 288; post-Order, 146; rice, 401
伊拉克：美国，战争，229、241；能源生产，228；两伊战争，137；石油，232；果园，399；后订单和，146、246、151、422；火鸡和，209，252，419
Iraq: America, war with, 229, 241; energy production of, 228; Iran-Iraq War, 137; oil, 232; orchards, 399; post-Order and, 146, 246, 151, 422; Turkey and, 209, 252, 419
铁，282、291–93；澳大利亚，369；布什维尔德和，307；铸铁，43；法国，286；生铁，43；后订单和，149；锻铁，43
iron, 282, 291–93; Australia, 369; Bushveld and, 307; cast iron, 43; France, 286; pig iron, 43; post-Order and, 149; wrought iron, 43
铁器时代，167、281–82
Iron Age, 167, 281–82
以色列：巴以冲突，41；订单后安全, 148, 154; 钾肥，411；土耳其和, 148, 419
Israel: Palestinian-Israeli conflict, 41; post-Order security, 148, 154; potash, 411; Turkey and, 148, 419
意大利：阿尔及利亚，256；气候变化，453；记入, 188; 60、96、356 的人口统计数据；装备制造, 379, 405; 食品出口，416；葡萄，465；重型车辆制造，379；意大利 1950/1995（图表），57；意大利 2020/2040（图表），58；利比亚和，257；制造业，341；海军，358；后订单，288；石英，314；俄罗斯，260
Italy: Algeria and, 256; climate change, 453; credit in, 188; demographics of, 60, 96, 356; equipment manufacturing, 379, 405; food exporting, 416; grapes, 465; heavy vehicle manufacturing, 379; Italy 1950/1995 (chart), 57; Italy 2020/2040 (chart), 58; Libya and, 257; manufacturing, 341; navy, 358; post-Order, 288; quartz, 314; Russia, 260
日本：纸板货币，170；集装箱，335个；债务，观点，179-80；通货紧缩，214；人口统计数据，352；经济崩溃，186；的财务模型，179-83；第一岛链，无秩序保障，141；食品，后订单，152；重型车辆制造，379；印度，投资，371-72；工业化，329；入侵朝鲜，木材，286；海军能力，356；1980 年代的房地产，185；核电，315；石油, 227, 252, 353; 81-84 的生长后寿命；降雨量, 448; 安全，订购后，148-50；半导体, 336, 382; 东南亚，286；运输，中东，邮政订单，158；西方消费和, 335–36
Japan: cardboard currency, 170; containers, 335; debt, view of, 179–80; deflation, 214; demographics of, 352; economic crash of, 186; financial model of, 179–83; First Island Chain, without Order security, 141; food, post-Order, 152; heavy vehicle manufacturing, 379; India, investment, 371–72; industrialization and, 329; invasion of Korea, timber, 286; naval capacity, 356; 1980s real estate, 185; nuclear power, 315; oil, 227, 252, 353; postgrowth life of, 81–84; rainfall, 448; security, post-Order, 148–50; semiconductors, 336, 382; Southeast Asia, 286; transport, Middle East, post-Order, 158; Western consumption and, 335–36
即时库存，333–34、354、366、376
just-in-time inventory, 333–34, 354, 366, 376
卡沙甘, 221–23, 248
Kashagan, 221–23, 248
哈萨克斯坦：农业，406；装备制造，406；食品出口，416；卡沙甘，221–23、248；油，230、235、246；订单后，67；2022 年石油产量，235–36；铀，315；小麦, 402, 450
Kazakhstan: agriculture, 406; equipment manufacturing, 406; food exporting, 416; Kashagan, 221–23, 248; oil, 230, 235, 246; post-Order, 67; 2022 oil production, 235–36; uranium, 315; wheat, 402, 450
老挝，387、422、448–49
Laos, 387, 422, 448–49
青铜时代晚期的崩溃，167、456、475
Late Bronze Age Collapse, 167, 456, 475
铅, 172, 301, 304–5, 316–17
lead, 172, 301, 304–5, 316–17
利比亚，143、252、257、422
Libya, 143, 252, 257, 422
液化天然气, 193, 257, 260, 407
liquified natural gas, 193, 257, 260, 407
锂, 272–73, 278, 299–301, 369
lithium, 272–73, 278, 299–301, 369
马来西亚：农业，406；亚洲金融模式，183；60 岁的人口统计数据；食品进口，417；制造业，338–39、369、378；石油生产，256；该命令和，140；稀土元素，310；半导体，382；新加坡和, 330
Malaysia: agriculture, 406; Asian financial model, 183; demographics of, 60; food importing, 417; manufacturing, 338–39, 369, 378; oil production, 256; the Order and, 140; rare earth elements, 310; semiconductors, 382; Singapore and, 330
制造业：航空航天，384；汽车，378；计算机，383；东亚，335-40；电子，384；欧洲，340–42；2019 年按行业分列的全球制造业收入（图表），385；重型车辆，378-80；帝国制度，327；整合，330；“及时”库存系统，333；木材，380-81；机械，385；新工业厂房，375-78；产品，378-87；半导体，382-83；智能手机，383-84；供应链，332；纺织品，386-87；接线，386–87
manufacturing: aerospace, 384; automotive, 378; computers, 383; East Asia, 335–40; electronics, 384; Europe, 340–42; Global Manufacturing Revenue by Sector, 2019 (chart), 385; heavy vehicle, 378–80; imperial systems, 327; integration, 330; “just-in-time” inventorying system, 333; lumber, 380–81; machinery, 385; new industrial plant, 375-78; products, 378–87; semiconductors, 382–83; smartphones, 383–84; supply chains, 332; textiles, 386–87; wiring, 386–87
特大城市, 20, 155
megacities, 20, 155
大都市, 268
Megalopolis, 268
重商主义，75-76
mercantilism, 75–76
汞, 172
mercury, 172
美索不达米亚，164–67、281、355、394–95
Mesopotamia, 164–67, 281, 355, 394–95
美墨战争，30
Mexican-American War, 30
墨西哥，99–103；农业，404；美国，移民，99–103；资本主义，70；气候变化，448、453；可可，466；计算机，383；人口统计学，61, 155, 474；牛仔布，323；食品进口，417；绿色科技，362；制造业，349-50；制造业的未来，363–64、378、380、382；北美自由贸易协定，343、349–50、366；石油，238–39、288；降雨量, 448; 贸易和, 156, 361; 订单后安全，155-56；锌, 317
Mexico, 99–103; agriculture, 404; America, immigration to, 99–103; capitalism and, 70; climate change, 448, 453; cocoa, 466; computers, 383; demographics, 61, 155, 474; denim, 323; food imports, 417; greentech, 362; manufacturing, 349–50; manufacturing, future of, 363–64, 378, 380, 382; NAFTA, 343, 349–50, 366; oil, 238–39, 288; rainfall, 448; trade and, 156, 361; post-Order security, 155–56; zinc, 317
中东：深水技术，232；61 岁的人口统计数据；订购后，157–58、412、421；绵羊，393
Middle East: deepwater technology, 232; demographics of, 61; post-Order, 157–58, 412, 421; sheep, 393
千禧一代，91–96 岁，195 岁；美国的未来，362–63, 474；资本供应和，215
Millennials, 91–96, 195; American future and, 362–63, 474; capital supply and, 215
用于绿色技术的矿物（图表），288
Minerals Used in Green Technologies (chart), 288
现代能源，223–28
modern energy, 223–28
钼，305–6
molybdenum, 305–6
蒙古人，68、118、282、430
Mongols, 68, 118, 282, 430
单一栽培，429-30
monoculture, 429–30
更多, 概念, 70
more, concept of, 70
摩洛哥, 61, 410–11, 419
Morocco, 61, 410–11, 419
缅甸，157、369、424–25
Myanmar, 157, 369, 424–25
北美自由贸易协定，102、343、349、360–67、376–77
NAFTA, 102, 343, 349, 360–67, 376–77
拿破仑, 115, 173, 473
Napoleon, 115, 173, 473
民族国家, 44, 98, 371
nation-states, 44, 98, 371
北约，41
NATO, 41
天然气，259–62；煤矿和 225；需求和，149；中断, 276; 安然，190；化肥和，409；水力压裂法，241；greentech 和 268、272、408；墨西哥湾沿岸和 345；276-77 的主要消费者；北美自由贸易协定，361；天然气贸易（图表），261；俄罗斯，150、252；斯堪的纳维亚，359；东南亚，369；替代输入，264；美和，193，300
natural gas, 259–62; coal mines and, 225; demand and, 149; disruption of, 276; Enron, 190; fertilizers and, 409; fracking, 241; greentech and, 268, 272, 408; Gulf Coast and, 345; major consumers of, 276–77; NAFTA, 361; Natural Gas Trade (chart), 261; Russia, 150, 252; Scandinavia, 359; Southeast Asia and, 369; substitute input, 264; United States and, 193, 300
荷兰：农业，404、428；牛肉，460；帽, 459; 60 岁的人口统计数据；去包，84；食品出口，417；法国和，341；爪哇，石油，226；制造业，342；海军能力，358；作为交易员的声誉，114
Netherlands: agriculture, 404, 428; beef, 460; CAP, 459; demographics of, 60; desourcing, 84; food exports, 417; France and, 341; Java, oil in, 226; manufacturing, 342; naval capacity, 358; reputation as trader, 114
新喀里多尼亚，镍，311
New Caledonia, nickel, 311
牛顿，艾萨克，174
Newton, Isaac, 174
新西兰：农业，404–5, 428；人口统计学，67, 96, 431；食物, 416, 430; 全球乳业，460；印度尼西亚，207；该命令，52；订购后，148、156–57、370、386；降雨量和，451；东南亚集团，后序，148、157、370；运输，订购后，156-57；城市化，156；小麦，402；羊毛和棉花，386
New Zealand: agriculture, 404–5, 428; demographics, 67, 96, 431; food, 416, 430; global dairy, 460; Indonesia, 207; the Order, 52; post–Order, 148, 156–57, 370, 386; rainfall and, 451; Southeast Asian bloc, post-Order, 148, 157, 370; transport, post-Order, 156–57; urbanization, 156; wheat, 402; wool and cotton, 386
镍, 286, 297, 311–12, 369
nickel, 286, 297, 311–12, 369
尼日利亚：中国和，368–69；内战，246；气候变化，442、453；牛奶，459；食品出口，416；黄金，171；独立性，229；液化天然气，260；石油生产，229、246、255；后订单, 244, 419
Nigeria: China and, 368–69; civil war, 246; climate change and, 442, 453; dairy milk, 459; food exports, 416; gold, 171; independence of, 229; liquefied natural gas, 260; oil production, 229, 246, 255; post-Order, 244, 419
粪便，10
night soil, 10
诺里尔斯克, 308, 312
Norilsk, 308, 312
北美：航空航天，384；89 的农田；362-63 的未来人口统计数据；地理, 39, 139; 制造业，343–50、379–80、405；制造业，未来，360–68；批量生产，375；天然气，259；石油生产，234、238、244、257、474；磷酸盐，411；港口，31；安全威胁，缺乏，90。另见北美自由贸易协定
North America: aerospace, 384; farmland of, 89; future demographics of, 362–63; geography of, 39, 139; manufacturing, 343–50, 379–80, 405; manufacturing, future of, 360–68; mass production, 375; natural gas and, 259; oil production, 234, 238, 244, 257, 474; phosphates, 411; ports of, 31; security threat, lack of, 90. See also NAFTA
北美自由贸易协定。见北美自由贸易协定
North American Free Trade Agreement. See NAFTA
东北亚：欧洲产品和，357；食品，407；日本和，148；液化天然气，260、262；制造业，未来，351；大豆，432；内心的信任，351
Northeast Asia: European products and, 357; food products, 407; Japan and, 148; liquefied natural gas, 260, 262; manufacturing, future of, 351; soy, 432; trust within, 351
北欧, 359, 407, 450
Northern Europe, 359, 407, 450
北海, 256, 275, 359
North Sea, 256, 275, 359
挪威，252–53、256、295、314、417
Norway, 252–53, 256, 295, 314, 417
努比亚, 164, 166
Nubia, 164, 166
核反应堆，315
nuclear reactors, 315
奥巴马、贝拉克、194、201、471、472
Obama, Barack, 194, 201, 471, 472
海港, 美国, 31
ocean ports, America and, 31
石油：可破坏性，250–51；作为全球商品，228；全球出口和未来风险，244-46；全球各行业石油消费量（图表），264；全球供求关系，247；重酸，257；249–50 的弹性；不可分离性，251-53；清淡的糖果，257；处理，257-58；生产基地，226、253–57；生产 2022，232-44；的独特性，249-53；嗯，世界第一，226
oil: disruptability, 250–51; as global commodity, 228; global exports and future risks, 244–46; Global Oil Consumption by Sector (chart), 264; global supply and demand, 247; heavy sours, 257; inelasticity of, 249–50; inseparability, 251–53; light sweets, 257; processing of, 257–58; production sites, 226, 253–57; production 2022, 232–44; uniqueness of, 249–53; well, world’s first, 226
一带一路计划，186
One Belt One Road program, 186
一孩政策, 338, 351–52
One Child Policy, 338, 351–52
欧尔班，维克托，205
Orban, Viktor, 205
命令, 3, 319; 访问和，289；农业和，403-4；美国创造的安全和贸易秩序，74；美国经济活力和，360，366；美国制度化秩序，65；美国利益和，55；美国安全和，55, 149；布雷顿森林体系，39；资本流动，212；中国和, 59, 158, 183; 气候变化，442；集装箱化，129；人口统计，50, 177；规模经济和，401-2；成功的地理，289；地理和，139，141；全球化，扩展，199；工业化，289-90；劳动分化，384；东亚制造业，335-40；材料和，319；肉，457-58；地中海，145；石油和 159、223、228–31、234、248；和平，176、222；大米，438–39；安全和 124、133、258；单一市场，251；苏联，40、53、80、442；总和，335；贸易，123；运输和，124；城市化，51；小麦和, 398–99, 403, 406
Order, the, 3, 319; access and, 289; agriculture and, 403–4; American-created security and trade order, 74; American economic dynamism and, 360, 366; American institutionalized order, 65; American interests and, 55; American security and, 55, 149; Bretton Woods and, 39; capital movement, 212; China and, 59, 158, 183; climate change and, 442; containerization and, 129; demographics and, 50, 177; economies of scale and, 401–2; Geographies of Success, 289; geography and, 139, 141; globalization, extension of, 199; industrialization, 289–90; labor differentiation, 384; manufacturing in east Asia, 335–40; materials and, 319; meat and, 457–58; Mediterranean and, 145; oil and, 159, 223, 228–31, 234, 248; peace and, 176, 222; rice, 438–39; safety and, 124, 133, 258; single market of, 251; Soviet Union, 40, 53, 80, 442; summation of, 335; trade, 123; transportation and, 124; urbanization and, 51; wheat and, 398–99, 403, 406
组织简单，325
organizational simplicity, 325
巴基斯坦, 15, 146, 402, 417, 449, 453, 456, 464
Pakistan, 15, 146, 402, 417, 449, 453, 456, 464
钯, 284, 307
palladium, 284, 307
棕榈油，461–62
palm oil, 461–62
PAMP, 303n
PAMP, 303n
镇纸, 139, 168, 273
paperweight, 139, 168, 273
巴布亚新几内亚, 369
Papua New Guinea, 369
美式和平，366
Pax Americana, 366
梨, 394, 466
pears, 394, 466
养老金, 203, 214–16
pensions, 203, 214–16
波斯, 165–66, 228, 395
Persia, 165–66, 228, 395
波斯湾：阿尔及利亚，256；美国的存在，138；民航和 385；石油生产和 232–33、244、353；波斯湾能源（图表），233；订购后，141–43、232、287、385、407；里根政府和 137
Persian Gulf: Algeria, 256; American presence in, 138; civilian aviation and, 385; oil production and, 232–33, 244, 353; Persian Gulf Energy (chart), 233; post-Order, 141–43, 232, 287, 385, 407; Reagan administration and, 137
秘鲁，171；阿塔卡马沙漠，285、296；铜，296；食品进口，417；油, 253, 288; 银牌，171–73；锌, 317
Peru, 171; Atacama Desert, 285, 296; copper, 296; food imports, 417; oil, 253, 288; silver, 171–73; zinc, 317
石化产品, 48, 263–64, 336, 339
petrochemicals, 48, 263–64, 336, 339
菲律宾：钴，298；食品进口，417；制造业，未来，369；镍，311；后订单，140；劳动力，339
Philippines: cobalt, 298; food imports, 417; manufacturing, future of, 369; nickel, 311; post-Order, 140; workforce of, 339
腓尼基，166
Phoenicia, 166
磷酸盐, 410–12, 439–40, 462
phosphates, 410–12, 439–40, 462
“八块”，173
“pieces of eight,” 173
海盗, 114, 150, 153, 222, 255, 357, 385
pirates, 114, 150, 153, 222, 255, 357, 385
瘟疫, the, 283–84
Plague, the, 283–84
铂族金属 (PGM)，307–8
platinum-group metals (PGMs), 307–8
波兰：农业，404-5；帽, 459; 60 岁的人口统计数据；食物，430；德国人和，396；煤油，225；天然气，260；俄罗斯和，146、235；盐矿，285；瑞典和后订单，341
Poland: agriculture, 404–5; CAP, 459; demographics of, 60; food, 430; Germans and, 396; kerosene, 225; natural gas, 260; Russia and, 146, 235; salt mine, 285; Sweden and, post-Order, 341
混养, 429
polyculture, 429
人口密度, 34, 39, 433
population density, 34, 39, 433
民粹主义, 87, 214, 472
populism, 87, 214, 472
猪肉, 401, 434–35, 437, 458
pork, 401, 434–35, 437, 458
葡萄牙：气候变化，453；深水养殖，19；60 岁的人口统计数据；食品进口，417；产业化，53；“八块”，173
Portugal: climate change, 453; deepwater culture and, 19; demographics of, 60; food imports, 417; industrialization of, 53; “pieces of eight,” 173
冷战后，41、442、472-73；巴西，367；布雷顿森林体系，127, 230；人口统计和 200；分化，322；经济繁荣，73；经济危机，163；该命令，37, 230；安全环境，41；苏区，53、157、367；速度，332
post–Cold War, 41, 442, 472–73; Brazil, 367; Bretton Woods and, 127, 230; demographics and, 200; differentiation, 322; economic boom of, 73; economic crises and, 163; the Order, 37, 230; security environment of, 41; Soviet areas and, 53, 157, 367; speed, 332
后阶世界：航天，384；美国外交政策，152；资本管制，212-13；资本外逃，212-13；期间的饥荒，423；成功的地域，211；greentech 和, 265, 300; 通货膨胀，213；锂和，300；石油和, 159, 248; 安全和，255；技术和，211-12；铀，315
post-Order world: aerospace, 384; American foreign policy and, 152; capital controls, 212–13; capital flight, 212–13; famines during, 423; geographies of success and, 211; greentech and, 265, 300; inflation and, 213; lithium and, 300; oil and, 159, 248; security and, 255; technology and, 211–12; uranium, 315
钾, 411–12, 462
potassium, 411–12, 462
波托西矿山，172–74、285
Potosi mines, 172–74, 285
陶器, 14, 325, 392, 395
pottery, 14, 325, 392, 395
每兆瓦时的电力成本（图表），274
Power Costs per Megawatt-Hour (chart), 274
动力织机，45
power loom, 45
私掠者, 124, 150–53, 357–58
privateers, 124, 150–53, 357–58
“抽水蓄能”，273
“pumped storage,” 273
石英, 312, 314
quartz, 312, 314
1798–1800 年的准战争，115
Quasi War of 1798–1800, 115
魁北克人，扑克牌，170
Quebecois, playing cards, 170
稀土元素，308-9
rare earth elements, 308–9
原材料，413
raw stock, 413
到达, 68
reach, 68
冷藏, 111, 398
refrigeration, 111, 398
文艺复兴, 79, 284, 290
Renaissance, 79, 284, 290
储备货币，171–75
reserve currencies, 171–75
罗兹，塞西尔，298
Rhodes, Cecil, 298
大米, 401, 419, 421–22, 424–25, 437–41
rice, 401, 419, 421–22, 424–25, 437–41
河流，11–15
rivers, 11–15
道路, 111, 122
roads, 111, 122
“岩油”，225
“rock oil,” 225
罗马帝国，15、17、68、111–12、170–71、282、396
Roman Empire, 15, 17, 68, 111–12, 170–71, 282, 396
罗马尼亚：农业，404–5；60 岁的人口统计数据；食品出口，417；油, 227, 235; 俄罗斯，146、235；铀，316；工资生产率，341
Romania: agriculture, 404–5; demographics of, 60; food exports, 417; oil, 227, 235; Russia, 146, 235; uranium, 316; wage product ratio, 341
中耕作物，404–5, 428, 432, 466
row crops, 404–5, 428, 432, 466
皇家造币厂，174
Royal Mint, 174
运行损失，258
run-loss, 258
俄罗斯：农业，406；信用，209；人口统计学，97；制造，未来，368；工业商品，353；镍, 286, 312; 核电，315；油，226、230、234–38、252；磷酸盐，410；80-81 的生长后寿命；订单后安全，150；石英，314；铁路，118-19；俄罗斯能源（图表），237；俄罗斯谷物出口与铁路长度（图表），119；硅，312；运输，订单后安全，157；风，450
Russia: agriculture, 406; credit, 209; demographics, 97; manufacturing, future of, 368; industrial commodities, 353; nickel, 286, 312; nuclear power, 315; oil, 226, 230, 234–38, 252; phosphates, 410; postgrowth life of, 80–81; post-Order security, 150; quartz, 314; railroads, 118–19; Russian Energy (chart), 237; Russian Grain Exports vs. Rail Length (chart), 119; silicon, 312; transport, post-Order security, 157; winds, 450
“安全区”，148
“safe zones,” 148
盐，波兰，285
salt, Poland, 285
圣安娜，30 岁
Santa Anna, 30
沙特阿拉伯, 61, 146, 208, 222, 228
Saudi Arabia, 61, 146, 208, 222, 228
久坐不动的农业革命，10-11
sedentary farming revolution, 10–11
种子, 413
seeds, 413
半导体，382-84；美国和，345；亚裔，183；自动化和，375；中国，354；铜和，295；设施再利用，136；黄金，302；马来西亚，338、339；铂族金属 (PGM)，307；硅和，313-14；台和，336；泰国, 338, 339
semiconductors, 382–84; America and, 345; Asian, 183; automation and, 375; China, 354; copper and, 295; facility repurposing, 136; gold, 302; Malaysia, 338, 339; platinum-group metals (PGMs), 307; silicon and, 313–14; Taiwan and, 336; Thailand, 338, 339
定居者国家，52、96–97、99、121
settler states, 52, 96–97, 99, 121
页岩油, 90, 240, 277
shale oil, 90, 240, 277
页岩革命, 90, 193, 241–44, 295, 345, 386
shale revolution, 90, 193, 241–44, 295, 345, 386
谢克尔，165–66
shekel, 165–66
硅，312–13
silicon, 312–13
银，172、285、301。另见货币
silver, 172, 285, 301. See also currency
新加坡：亚洲金融模式，181、183；学分，205-6；去包，84；食品进口，417；工业时代物流，120；产业化，330；制造业，339；制造业的未来，369–70；后订单，140
Singapore: Asian financial model, 181, 183; credit, 205–6; desourcing, 84; food imports, 417; Industrial Age logistics, 120; industrialization of, 330; manufacturing, 339; manufacturing, future of, 369–70; post-Order, 140
智能手机，383–84
smartphones, 383–84
社会主义, 71, 74
socialism, 71, 74
太阳能电池板，硅，313
solar panels, silicon, 313
南非, 307, 310, 368, 405
South Africa, 307, 310, 368, 405
东南亚, 157, 330, 335, 369–70
Southeast Asia, 157, 330, 335, 369–70
韩国：农业，409，422；亚洲金融危机，183、186；汽车，346辆；移动电话，336；气候变化，442、448、456；共产主义，72；55、60、96、213、352 的人口统计数据；经济崩溃，186；财务，181；全球化，52；工业化, 182, 329; 日本，141、181、286、361、372；制造业，335；肉类，435；纳霍德卡，237；天然气，260；油, 276, 353; 后订单，140；降雨量, 448; 半导体, 336, 382; 运输和订单，133；智能手机，383；钢，292；超级油轮，330；用品，316；西方消费和, 335–36
South Korea: agriculture, 409, 422; Asian financial crisis, 183, 186; cars, 346; cellular telephony, 336; climate change, 442, 448, 456; communism, 72; demographics of, 55, 60, 96, 213, 352; economic crash of, 186; finance, 181; globalization, 52; industrialization, 182, 329; Japan, 141, 181, 286, 361, 372; manufacturing, 335; meat, 435; Nakhodka, 237; natural gas, 260; oil, 276, 353; post-Order, 140; rainfall, 448; semiconductors, 336, 382; shipping and the Order, 133; smartphones, 383; steel, 292; supertanker, 330; supplies, 316; Western consumption and, 335–36
苏联垮台，40–41、81、367
Soviet Union fall, 40–41, 81, 367
大豆，432–37
soy, 432–37
西班牙：农业，404-5；柑橘，465；深水养殖，19-20；人口统计数据，96；食品出口，416；工业化，4, 53, 60；通货膨胀，173；制造业，341；天然气，260；海军容量，358；艾萨克·牛顿，174 岁；猪肉，458；波托西矿山, 172, 285
Spain: agriculture, 404–5; citrus, 465; deepwater culture, 19–20; demographics of, 96; food exports, 416; industrialization, 4, 53, 60; inflation, 173; manufacturing, 341; natural gas, 260; naval capacity of, 358; Isaac Newton, 174; pork, 458; Potosi mines, 172, 285
国家海盗行为，151–52、287
state piracy, 151–52, 287
蒸汽, 21, 117, 120
steam, 21, 117, 120
钢，292–93；澳大利亚，293；铬，311；法国，293；船体，120；钼，305；镍，311；“不锈钢”钢，311；瑞典，293
steel, 292–93; Australia, 293; chromium, 311; France, 293; hulls, 120; molybdenum, 305; nickel, 311; “stainless” steel, 311; Sweden, 293
石器时代，281
Stone Age, 281
次贷, 194, 204, 240, 250
subprime, 194, 204, 240, 250
撒哈拉以南非洲：中国和 368；气候变化，451；新冠肺炎，87；61 岁的人口统计数据；饮食改变，401；肥料，409；食物和, 421, 426; 工业商品和，353；木材，381；钾盐和磷酸盐，412；贸易和，158；运输，后订单和，158
Sub-Saharan Africa: China and, 368; climate change, 451; COVID, 87; demographics of, 61; diet changes, 401; fertilizers, 409; food and, 421, 426; industrial commodities and, 353; lumber, 381; potash and phosphates, 412; trade and, 158; transport, post-Order and, 158
糖，463
sugar, 463
向日葵, 466
sunflowers, 466
瑞典, 293, 300, 341, 359
Sweden, 293, 300, 341, 359
瑞士, 303, 303n
Switzerland, 303, 303n
台湾, 335–36, 352–53, 372, 382, 448
Taiwan, 335–36, 352–53, 372, 382, 448
特斯拉，297、299–300
Tesla, 297, 299–300
墨西哥叛乱，30
Texican rebellion, 30
纺织品：亚和，182；英国和，43，223；扩散, 47; 规模经济，375；工业革命，42；后订单, 375, 386; 鲸油，223-24；妇女和，48
textiles: Asia and, 182; Britain and, 43, 223; diffusion of, 47; economics of scale, 375; Industrial Revolution and, 42; post-Order, 375, 386; whale oil and, 223–24; women and, 48
泰国：农业，406；亚洲金融模式，183；人口统计数据，352；经济崩溃，186；产业化经验，330；制造业，338-39；制造业的未来，369–70；石油生产，256；石英，314；降雨量，448–49；半导体，382
Thailand: agriculture, 406; Asian financial model, 183; demographics of, 352; economic crash of, 186; industrialization experience of, 330; manufacturing, 338–39; manufacturing, future of, 369–70; oil production, 256; quartz, 314; rainfall, 448–49; semiconductors, 382
烟草, 463
tobacco, 463
德政180
tokusei, 180
2020 年按来源分类的全球能源使用总量（图表），270
Total Global Energy Use by Source, 2020 (chart), 270
私人信贷总额（图表），210
Total Private Credit (chart), 210
丰田, 82, 333
Toyota, 82, 333
贸易, 18, 123–24
trade, 18, 123–24
交通：城市，131-32；容器，127-29；深水时代，113-16；规模经济，124-27；端口，130-31；订单后安全，150；道路，112；供应链，132–34、155；水，112
transport: cities, 131–32; containers, 127–29; deepwater age, 113–16; economies of scale in, 124–27; ports, 130–31; post-Order security, 150; roads, 112; supply chains, 132–34, 155; water, 112
西伯利亚大铁路 (TSR)，157
Trans-Siberian Railway (TSR), 157
火鸡, 148, 150–51, 158, 209, 252, 314
Turkey, 148, 150–51, 158, 209, 252, 314
旋转螺杆电机，120
turn-screw motors, 120
二十英尺标准箱 (TEU)，128
twenty-foot equivalent unit (TEU), 128
乌克兰：玉米和大豆，433；60 岁的人口统计数据；食品出口，416；重型设备制造，406；天然气，260；俄罗斯和，119、146；钢，292；向日葵和油菜，466；小麦, 402, 447
Ukraine: corn and soy, 433; demographics of, 60; food exports, 416; heavy equipment manufacturing, 406; natural gas, 260; Russia and, 119, 146; steel, 292; sunflowers and canola, 466; wheat, 402, 447
乌克兰战争，105、209、236、238、358、481
Ukraine War, 105, 209, 236, 238, 358, 481
阿拉伯联合酋长国, 146, 232, 303
United Arab Emirates, 146, 232, 303
2020 年美国人口统计（图表），93
United States Demography 2020 (chart), 93
2019 年美国种族人口（图表），97
United States Population by Race 2019 (chart), 97
解开, 64
unraveling, 64
铀, 314–16, 309, 369
uranium, 314–16, 309, 369
城市化：发达的发展中国家，473；中国, 158, 291, 311, 426, 440, 473；人口统计和 102；东亚，95；能源和，276；食物和，395；印度尼西亚，352；工业化，199–200；日本，81；劳动力专业化，15；墨西哥，102；命令和，52-53；贫穷国家，387；二战后时代和 42、81；技术和，20；越南, 352
urbanization: advanced developing world, 473; China, 158, 291, 311, 426, 440, 473; demographics and, 102; East Asia, 95; energy and, 276; food and, 395; Indonesia, 352; industrialization and, 199–200; Japan, 81; labor specialization and, 15; Mexico, 102; the Order and, 52–53; poor countries and, 387; post-WW II era and, 42, 81; technology and, 20; Vietnam, 352
美国和欧洲，小麦产量与种植公顷数（图表），400
US & Europe, Wheat Production vs. Hectares Planted (chart), 400
美国外国出生人口（图表），101
US Foreign-born Population (chart), 101
美国按年龄组划分的净资产，1000 美元（图表），216
US Net Worth by Age Group, 1000USD (chart), 216
2020 年全球初级农产品贸易价值（图表），468
Value of Primary Global Agricultural Trade, 2020 (chart), 468
委内瑞拉：农业，422；美国和，421；240 年未遂政变；非文明化，66；油，248、250、254–55；《社会主义》之，71n；解开, 64
Venezuela: agriculture of, 422; America and, 421; coup attempt in, 240; decivilization and, 66; oil, 248, 250, 254–55; “socialism” of, 71n; unraveling, 64
越南：气候变化，453；61、352 的人口统计数据；食品出口，416；工业化，54, 330；劳动，342，369；制造业，339；石油生产，256；猪肉，458；后订单，140；大米，449；东南亚集团，370；城市化，352
Vietnam: climate change, 453; demographics of, 61, 352; food exports, 416; industrialization and, 54, 330; labor of, 342, 369; manufacturing, 339; oil production, 256; pork, 458; post-Order, 140; rice, 449; Southeast Asian bloc and, 370; urbanization of, 352
高风险环境下的战争险保险成本估算（图表），126
War Risk Insurance Cost Estimates in a High Risk Environment (chart), 126
水, 11–15, 391
water, 11–15, 391
水车, 14
waterwheels, 14
鲸油, 224, 226
whale oil, 224, 226
小麦，392–406；烹饪，13；减轻饥荒，429-31；第一工具和，325；边缘区域和，453-54；该命令以及，438；价格，121；俄罗斯，416–17、450；战争和, 438
wheat, 392–406; cooking of, 13; famine mitigation and, 429–31; first tools and, 325; marginal areas and, 453–54; the Order and, 438; prices of, 121; Russia, 416–17, 450; war and, 438
风力革命, 15–21, 408
wind revolution, 15–21, 408
妇女权利运动，22、48–49
women’s rights movement, 22, 48–49
津巴布韦，解开，64、66、298、417、422
Zimbabwe, unraveling, 64, 66, 298, 417, 422
锌, 288, 301, 316–17
zinc, 288, 301, 316–17
缩放器，94
Zoomers, 94
关于作者
About the Author
PETER ZEIHAN是地缘政治战略家，也是地缘政治咨询公司 Zeihan 的创始人。他的客户包括能源公司、金融机构、商业协会、农业利益集团、大学和美国军方。他是《偶然的超级大国》 、《缺席的超级大国》和《分裂的国家》的作者。他住在科罗拉多州。
PETER ZEIHAN is a geopolitical strategist and the founder of the consulting firm Zeihan on Geopolitics. His clients include energy corporations, financial institutions, business associations, agricultural interests, universities, and the U.S. military. He is the author of The Accidental Superpower, The Absent Superpower, and Disunited Nations. He lives in Colorado.
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Also by Peter Zeihan
Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World
缺席的超级大国：页岩革命和没有美国的世界
The Absent Superpower: The Shale Revolution and a World Without America
偶然的超级大国：下一代美国的卓越地位和即将到来的全球混乱
The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder
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THE END OF THE WORLD IS JUST THE BEGINNING. Copyright © 2022 by Peter Zeihan. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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数字版 2022 年 6 月 ISBN：978-0-06-323048-4
Digital Edition JUNE 2022 ISBN: 978-0-06-323048-4
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*对于那些对这个话题着迷的人来说，恐怕这就是我和我的编辑的胃能承受的了。我很乐意向您推荐贾里德·戴蒙德 (Jared Diamond) 的《枪炮、病菌与钢铁》( Guns, Germs, and Steel)，因为它时不时地引人入胜地详细介绍了便便园艺革命的经济生物学意义。
*For those of you fascinated by this topic, I’m afraid this is all my and my editor’s stomach can handle. I’ll happily refer you to Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel for its at-times train-wreck-fascination level of detail on the econo-biological implications of the Gardening-in-Poo Revolution.
*这是一种我们会一遍又一遍地看到的模式，直到现在赤裸裸。谁来做高附加值的工作仍然是我们今天争论的问题。这种就业不仅产生最高的工资，而且产生最快的技术和资本建设以及最大的税基。
*It’s a pattern we will see over and over and over right up to the naked now. Who gets to do the high value-added work is still something we fight about today. Such employments generate not simply the highest wages, but the fastest technological and capital builds and the largest tax bases.
*有趣的事实：特朗普政府为建造有意义的边界墙所做的努力首先需要为隔离墙的建设和维护建立道路网。新的基础设施使毒品走私和非法移民变得更加容易，而不是更加困难。
*Fun fact: the Trump administration’s efforts to build a meaningful border wall first required the establishment of a web of roads for the wall’s construction and maintenance. That new infrastructure made drug smuggling and illegal immigration easier, not more difficult.
*顺便说一句，我们在美国一次又一次地看到这种延迟和分阶段的升级，无论是公路、铁路、电力线、电话、手机还是宽带。这种分阶段的发展似乎使美国在某种程度上不如德国、日本、荷兰或韩国等国家先进，这些国家的此类进程以极快的速度发生，但这也意味着美国的现代化进程（远）成本低，成本低。对国家的财政能力造成压力。这不是错误。这是一个特点。
*Incidentally, we’ve seen this delayed and staged upgrading time and time again in the United States, whether it be for roads or rail lines or power lines or telephones or cell phones or broadband. Such staged development might seem to make the United States somewhat less advanced than countries like Germany or Japan or the Netherlands or Korea, where such processes occur at a breakneck pace, but it also means the American modernization process is (far) cheaper and less of a strain on the country’s financial capacity. It isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.
*德国工业化进程的绝对速度与德国的地理条件相结合，促成了世界大战的创伤性恐怖。德国人缺乏一个海外帝国来吸收他们过剩的人口。即使在第一次世界大战前的鼎盛时期，德国也没有那么大——比蒙大拿加爱达荷小一点——而且一半的领土太崎岖不平，不易开发。一旦工业技术使德国人口得以扩张，德国人很快发现他们无处可扩张，这也是希特勒如此痴迷于在地平线上咀嚼的部分原因。
*The sheer speed of the German industrialization process combined with the German geography contributed to the traumatic horrors of the world wars. Germans lacked an overseas empire to absorb their surplus populations. Even at its pre–World War I peak, Germany just wasn’t that big—a bit smaller than Montana plus Idaho—and half the territory is too rugged to be easily developed. Once industrial techs enabled the German population to expand, Germans quickly discovered they had nowhere to expand into, part and parcel of why Hitler was so obsessed with munching on the horizon.
*前者多见于集权控制薄弱的地方，如阿根廷、巴西、乌克兰；后者则常态于以国家发展计划着称的国家，如印度、中国、南非。
*The former is more common in places where centralized control is weak, such as Argentina, Brazil, and Ukraine, while the latter is the norm in countries with a reputation for national development plans, such as India, China, and South Africa.
*从技术上讲，许多西半球国家也是第一轮秩序的一部分，因为它们是布雷顿森林体系的签署国，但他们中的大多数选择接受该体系的安全方面（没有帝国），而没有有意义地参与经济方面。
*Technically, many Western Hemisphere nations were also part of the first round of the Order, as they were Bretton Woods signatories, but most of them chose to embrace the security aspects of the system (no empires) without meaningfully participating in the economic aspects.
*如果其中一些数据和时间表看起来有点模糊，那是因为它们确实如此。从地理上看，中国非常复杂，产生了同样复杂且不统一的政治历史。在地理多样性和政治争夺之间，没有单一的中国发展道路。像上海这样的地方早在 1900 年就开始了工业化（不均衡），而中国北方大部分地区直到 1958-62 年大跃进的灾难才开始试验一般过程。人口增长的结果同样不平衡：一些沿海地区经历繁荣的时间比其他地区早得多。总体而言，在 1950 年至 1970 年间，中国人口从 5.4 亿增加到 8.1 亿。伊什。与此相反，大跃进引发了人类最大的人为饥荒之一，导致 1500 万至 5500 万人死亡，具体取决于谁在书写历史。那么尼克松访问时“中国”是否完全未工业化？不是，当时的中国是已经占全球碳排放量的 5%。但中国仍然很大，所以即使是这些排放量也来自生活在最发达的沿海/南部城市的一小部分人口。
*If some of these data and timelines seem a bit squishy, it is because they are. Geographically, China is remarkably complex, generating a similarly complex—and disunited—political history. Between geographic variety and political scramble, there is no singular Chinese development path. Places like Shanghai had started industrializing (unevenly) as early as 1900, while most of northern China didn’t even begin experimenting with the general process until the disasters of the Great Leap Forward of 1958–62. The result in population growth was similarly uneven: some of the coastal regions experienced the boom far earlier than others. Overall, between 1950 and 1970, China’s population expanded from 540 million to 810 million. Ish. Countering that, the Great Leap Forward generated one of humanity’s greatest man-made famines, resulting in between 15 million and 55 million deaths, depending on who is writing the history. So was “China” fully unindustrialized when Nixon visited? No. China at that time was already responsible for 5 percent of global carbon emissions. But China is still huge, so even those emissions came from a very small percentage of the population living in the most advanced coastal/southern cities.
*对于那些认为我应该选择电动模型而不是汽油的绿色环保主义者，我试过了。这比用铲子快，但电动机缺乏快速清除积雪的能力。有大约四英寸的雪，我可以在大约五个小时内清理我的空间。不止于此，电动引擎可能会自行烧毁。这该死的东西在很短的时间内就兑现了它的威胁。
*For you greenies out there who think I should have gone for an electric model instead of gasoline, I tried. It was quicker than using a shovel, but electric motors simply lack the power to clear snow quickly. With about four inches of snow I could clear my spaces in about five hours. Any more than that and the electric engine threatened to burn itself out. The damn thing made good on its threat in very short order.
*值得注意的是，许多声称是社会主义的制度实际上根本不是。例如，最困扰美国右翼的版本是委内瑞拉的“社会主义”。在委内瑞拉，社会主义是精英们用于政治掩护的品牌名称，他们掠夺一切，包括字面上确定的东西，所有这些都是为了他们自己的个人利益。我们应该害怕它。但这不是社会主义。那是盗贼统治。绝对不是功能主义。
*It’s worth noting that many systems that claim to be socialist in reality are anything but. The version that most haunts the American Right, for example, is the “socialism” of Venezuela. In Venezuela, socialism is the brand name used by the elite for political cover while they loot everything up to and including things that are literally nailed down, all for their own personal gain. We should be afraid of it. But that’s not socialism. That’s kleptocracy. Definitely not a functional -ism.
而且我敢肯定，有一些经典的政治学家和/或理论家将“社会主义”与“拥有生产资料的工人”联系在一起。那从来没有发生过，我倾向于忽略从未发生过的事情。当代经济学家将“社会主义”一词等同于欧洲流行的慷慨的社会福利国家，我认为没有必要与他们争论。
And I’m sure there are some classic political scientists and/or ideologues who associate “socialism” with “workers owning the means of production.” That has happened exactly never, and I tend to ignore things that have never happened. Contemporary economists equate the term “socialism” with the generous social welfare states popular in Europe, and I see no need to argue with them.
*我敢肯定，有一些理论家和/或经济学家在读这篇文章时想知道我对“真正的”或“纯粹的”共产主义的看法：国家的存在是一种公正的机制，可以从有能力的人那里分配商品和服务有需要的人。自卡尔·马克思时代以来，没有人尝试过。. . 从来没有人愿意，仅仅因为人就是人，在这样的制度下，那些有能力的人要么变成树懒，要么变成缺陷。不同意？长大。或者去你自己的星球并用非人类的东西填充它。
*I’m sure there are a few ideologues and/or economists reading this wondering what I think about “true” or “pure” communism: the idea that the state exists to be an impartial mechanism for distributing goods and services from those with ability to those with need. Since the time of Karl Marx, no one has tried it . . . and no one ever will, simply because people are people and under such a system those with the ability will either turn into sloths or defect. Disagree? Grow up. Or go off to your own planet and populate it with something that isn’t human.
*全国性的，更不用说全球性的了，关于 COVID 的统计数据是混乱的。这不仅仅是（只是）政策无能。超过 40% 的 COVID 病例没有症状，因此感染和死亡的真实数字无疑远高于这些数字。
*National, to say nothing of global, statistics on COVID are muddled. It isn’t (just) policy incompetence. Upwards of 40 percent of COVID cases are asymptomatic, so the true numbers of infections and deaths are undoubtedly much higher than these figures.
*德国也是联邦制，尽管不是自愿的。二战结束后，协约国为其制定了德国宪法。其结果是一种宪法结构，旨在阻碍快速的国家决策制定，特别是防止德国人将所有高地人推向他们的邻国。到目前为止，一切都很好。
*Germany is a federal system as well, although not by choice. After World War II ended the Allies wrote Germany’s constitution for it. The result was a constitutional structure purposely designed to hobble quick national decision making and in specific to prevent the Germans from going all Highlander on their neighbors. So far, so good.
*这三个国家的人口统计数据正在经历与墨西哥相同的出生率崩溃，仅落后几年。不管怎样，不会有大量的潜在移民步行更长时间前往美国。
*The collective demographics of this trio is going through the same birth rate collapse as Mexico, just a few years behind. One way or another, there aren’t going to be large numbers of would-be immigrants walking to the United States much longer.
*在这一时期，英国人完全是工具。他们不承认归化的美国公民身份。因此，任何出生在“殖民地”的人都是为了获得好印象而公平竞争。（生于 1775 年？在费城？哟，你仍然是英国人！加入海军！）
*The Brits were total tools in this period. They didn’t recognize naturalized American citizenship. So anyone who was born in the “colonies” was fair game for impressment. (Born in 1775? In Philadelphia? Yo, you’re still a British subject! Get in muh navy!)
*考虑到今天的巨型船只是如此巨大——世界上最大的集装箱船，韩国建造的 Evergreen-A 级，比世界上最大的当代建筑还要大——我们可能已经达到了最大尺寸。毕竟，这些庞然大物仍然需要能够进入港口，而大船需要的吃水深度比最大的海湾所能提供的要多。
*Considering that today’s megavessels are so mega—the world’s largest container ship, the Korean-built Evergreen-A class, is bigger than the world’s largest contemporary buildings—we have probably reached maximum size. After all, these behemoths still need to be able to enter ports, and the big boys require draft depths more than all but the largest bays can provide.
*英国人有一个超级可爱的想法，即美国人会以慷慨的信贷条件借给他们源源不断的黄金，这样英镑就可以再次占据主导地位。美国的回应是慷慨地让英国人负责布雷顿森林体系的座位分配。并不真地。童子军处理了这个问题。
*The Brits had this supercute idea that the Americans would lend them a bottomless supply of gold at generous credit terms so the pound could once again reign supreme. The American response was to graciously allow the Brits to be in charge of the seating assignments at Bretton Woods. Not really. The Boy Scouts handled that.
*如果有的话，我大大低估了这个案子。尽管美国人通过他们的战争利润积累了迄今为止最大的黄金储备，但人类生产的黄金中大约 90% 都被锁在博物馆展品和结婚戒指等物品中。
*If anything, I’m greatly understating the case. Even though the Americans via their war profits had accrued by far the largest gold reserves in history, something like 90 percent of the gold that humanity has produced is locked up in things like museum exhibits and wedding bands.
*我对中文系统一直没有信心的（许多）原因之一是中文 . . . 不。几年前，中国政府放松了对金融转移的限制，努力将人民币确立为全球储备货币。结果适得其反。在六个月内，中国公民洗牌了超过 1 万亿美元的资产，超出了中国政府的控制范围。北京迅速中止了计划，并猛烈关闭了转移系统。
*One of the (many) reasons I’ve never had confidence in the Chinese system is that the Chinese . . . don’t. A few years back, the Chinese government loosened restrictions on financial transfers in an effort to establish the Chinese yuan as a global reserve currency. It backfired. Within six months the Chinese citizenry had shuffled more than $1 trillion in assets beyond the reach of the Chinese government. Beijing quickly aborted the plans and slammed the transfer system shut.
*在加州，价格涨幅接近三倍，但那是因为卡利作弊。加利福尼亚州不维护完整的备用化石燃料系统，而是从邻国进口化石燃料衍生的电力。在会计欺诈行为中，加利福尼亚称此类进口为零碳，因为碳是在州界的另一边产生的。提示眼睛滚动。
*In California, the price increase is closer to triple, but that’s because Cali cheats. California doesn’t maintain a full backup fossil fuel system but instead imports fossil-fuel-derived power from neighboring states. In an act of accounting chicanery, California calls such imports zero-carbon because the carbon was generated on the other side of the state line. Cue the eye rolls.
*这是否意味着网格存储作为一个概念是愚蠢的？不。不是我说的。目前，大多数电力公司都维护着二级发电资产，这些资产每年只有几天在高峰供暖和/或制冷需求时才会启动。那些是一些昂贵的镇纸。安装一个小时的电网存储不仅可以让许多调峰电厂退休，而且每天都可以使用这种存储容量来减少正常的每日高峰需求。根据位置和天气，这可以减少 4-8% 的燃料使用。在全国范围内应用它，虽然你绝对不会达到净零，但你仍然在谈论很多苹果。
*Does this mean grid storage as a concept is stupid? Nah. Not what I’m saying. Right now, most power utilities maintain a secondary fleet of power generation assets that only get turned on for peak heating and/or cooling needs a few days a year. Those are some expensive paperweights. Not only does installing a single hour of grid storage enable the retirement of many of those peaker plants, but such storage capacity can be used every day to shave down the normal daily peak demand. Based on location and weather, that reduces fuel use by 4–8 percent. Apply that nationwide and, while you’re definitely not within reach of net zero, you’re still talking about a lot of apples.
*感谢真主，穆斯林帝国保存了他们遇到的技术知识。如果他们不这样做，欧洲在罗马之后的反复解体将会导致一个截然不同的现在。另一方面，如果穆斯林帝国大量应用他们管理的知识，我们现在可能都在其他星系度假了。并说阿拉伯语或土耳其语。
*Thank Allah the Muslim empires preserved the technical knowledges they came across. If they hadn’t, Europe’s repeated disintegrations post-Rome would have led to a very different present. On the flip side, if the Muslim empires had applied en masse the knowledges they stewarded, we’d all probably be vacationing in other star systems by now. And be speaking Arabic or Turkish.
*在 2022 年初撰写本文时，特斯拉已经在中国推出了一种无钴电池，但仅限于在中国占主导地位的非常小、几乎为零的内部存储车辆，这些车辆从未在美国找到市场利基.
*At the time of this writing in early 2022, Tesla has fielded a no-cobalt battery in China, but only in the very small, nearly zero-internal-storage vehicles that predominate there, which have never found a market niche in the United States.
*这也不包括令人讨厌的小细节，例如我们出于重量原因在电动汽车中使用铝，但出于强度原因在传统汽车中使用钢——而且，每磅铝所消耗的能量是钢的六倍。即使考虑到制造车架所需的铝重量更轻，但保守地说，与传统车辆相比，EV 车架的碳强度是原来的两倍。
*Nor does this include pesky little details like the fact that we use aluminum in EVs for reasons of weight, but steel in conventional cars for reasons of strength—and, per pound, aluminum takes six times the amount of energy to make compared to steel. Even considering that you need less aluminum by weight to make a vehicle frame, you’re still—conservatively—talking double the carbon intensity for an EV frame compared to a traditional vehicle.
*另外，就像我说的，伙计们。瑞士最大的金条生产商 PAMP 实际上制作了一份性别研究报告，该报告实质上为没有太多女性在其黄金精炼厂工作而道歉。阿拉伯联合酋长国的黄金制造商——本质上是一个厌恶女性的奴隶国家——认为没有必要效仿。
*Also, like I said, dudes. PAMP, the largest Swiss producer of gold bars, actually produced a gender study report that in essence apologizes for not having very many women working in their gold refineries. The gold makers of United Arab Emirates—in essence a misogynist slave state—felt no need to follow suit.
*考古学中也有一种持不同政见的观点认为，铅在罗马渡槽中的广泛使用导致了罗马晚期帝国管理不善和分裂。真的？不知道，但这无济于事。
*There’s also a dissident strain of thought in archaeology asserting that the extensive use of lead in Rome’s aqueducts contributed to imperial mismanagement and disassociation in the late Roman period. True? No idea, but it couldn’t have helped.
*没有大量的铝和硅，就不会提高车辆的行驶里程。也没有电动汽车。绿党注意：熔炼铝是耗能大户。锻造硅是能源密集型的。对它们进行合金化是耗能的。电动汽车的框架需要大约五倍于传统汽车的能量输入。这是特斯拉在其广告中遗漏的一系列不方便的非环保细节之一。
*There is no improving vehicle mileage without a lot of aluminum and silicon. No electronic vehicles, either. Greens take note: Smelting aluminum is power intensive. Forging silicon is power intensive. Alloying them is power intensive. The frame for an EV requires roughly quintuple the energy input of a traditional car. That’s one of a score of inconveniently non-environmentally friendly details Tesla leaves out of its advertising.
*实际上，我们还没有完全完成。如果总装在中国重庆进行，车辆将沿着长江运送 8-11 天，在上海停留几天，然后以 20 天的航行时间送往洛杉矶，然后装车一列开往区域配送中心的火车，最后是您在州际公路上看到的将最终产品从铁路站场运送到经销商处的专用卡车之一。即使汽车完成后，仍需要大约六周的时间才能到达销售点。组装和运输也不“全部”。这艘船的保险很可能来自伦敦，而确保油箱盖不会以某种方式在你睡梦中杀死你的规定来自欧盟。（欧盟比加州更臭名昭著的是其古怪的规定。）
*In reality, we’re not quite done. If final assembly happens in Chongqing, China, the vehicle will be shipped down the Yangtze for 8–11 days, dwell at Shanghai for a few days, then get sent on to Los Angeles with a sailing time of 20 days, before getting loaded onto a train en route to a regional distribution center, and finally one of those specialized trucks you see on the interstate that shuttles the final product from the rail yard to the dealership. Even once the car is finished, it still takes about six weeks to get to a point-of-sale. Nor is it “all” about assembly and transport. The insurance for the ship most likely came from London and the regulations that make sure the gas cap won’t somehow murder you in your sleep came from the EU. (The EU is more notorious than California for its bizarro regulations.)
*不要误会我的意思：当我看到一个关于一些中国间谍成功地将美国军事技术输送到北京的新故事时，我感觉不太好。但请正确看待它。直到 2017 年，中国才弄清楚如何在没有进口部件的情况下制造圆珠笔。中国可以获得一套蓝图并突然能够拼凑出隐形轰炸机或先进导弹系统的想法有点尖叫.
*Don’t get me wrong: I don’t feel great when I see a new story about some Chinese spy successfully funneling American military technology to Beijing. But please keep it in perspective. China didn’t figure out how to make a ball-point pen without imported components until 2017. The idea that China can get a set of blueprints and suddenly be able to cobble together a stealth bomber or advanced missile system is a bit of a scream.
*关于西撒哈拉是摩洛哥的一个省、有争议的领土还是一个独立的国家，非洲内部存在着冗长乏味的传奇故事。考虑到摩洛哥在我还活着的时候就一直控制着 WS，而这一章是关于世界上有多少人很快就会在黑暗中挨饿，你可以想象我是多么关心这些细节。
*There’s a tedious, drawn-out saga within Africa on whether Western Sahara is a Moroccan province, a disputed territory, or an independent nation. Considering that Morocco has controlled the WS as long as I’ve been alive, and that this is a chapter about how much of the world is going to soon be starving in the dark, you can imagine how much I care about such minutiae.
*喜欢有机产品并认为它们可以帮助解决这些问题？你的数学一定烂透了。他们的投入要高得多。专业种子。更高的水量。非化学杀虫剂和除草剂等更昂贵，而且运输、储存和使用时体积更大。有机投入的效率低得多，因此至少需要四倍于合成材料所需的田地传递，从而需要更多的劳动力和燃料。与传统农业相比，田间所有这些额外的活动都会加剧土壤侵蚀和水污染，这反过来又需要更多的投入。果园的主要有机“肥料”是不适合人类食用的鸡肉部分. 想象一下鸡内脏丝粘稠、刺鼻的物流链并不需要太多的想象力，当然，这需要一个冷藏链来防止完全腐烂的肮脏程度，从而大大增加有机物的碳足迹。在后端，结果是每英亩的产量要低得多，这意味着需要更多的土地和更多的低效投入来生产与更传统做法相同数量的食物。你可以吃有机食品或环保食品。你不能两者兼得。
*Love organic products and think they can help solve these issues? You must suck at math. Their inputs are much higher. Specialized seeds. Higher volumes of water. Nonchemical pesticides and herbicides and such are more expensive as well as bulkier to transport and store and apply. The far lower effectiveness of organic inputs necessitates at least quadruple the passes over fields that synthetics require, necessitating yet more labor and fuel. All that extra activity on a field encourages higher soil erosion and water contamination than traditional farming, which in turn demand more inputs. The leading organic “fertilizer” for orcharding is chicken parts not suitable for human consumption. It doesn’t take much imagination to visualize the gooey, pungent logistics chain for shredded chicken guts, which, of course, require a refrigeration chain to prevent utterly decadent levels of nastiness, drastically increasing organics’ carbon footprint. And at the back end, the result is far lower yields per acre, meaning even more land with even more low-effectiveness inputs required to generate the same volume of food as more conventional practices. You can have organic foods or environmentally friendly foods. You cannot have both.
*顺便说一下，有大量古生物学证据表明，这种干燥现象不仅在欧洲发生过多次，而且有时整个地中海盆地都已经枯萎成一个布丁纳吉亚版的死亡谷。
*Incidentally, there’s ample paleontological evidence indicating that not only has this sort of European drying happened on multiple occasions, but that at times the entire Mediterranean Basin has withered into a Brobdingnagian version of Death Valley.